Podcasts about Disagreement

Conflict. Division. Disagreements. Whether it's with a neighbor, a co-worker, a friend—or even a stranger—navigating relationships isn't always easy. Yet somehow, we're called to love our neighbor.  But what does that even mean? And how does it show up when relationships are so complicated? Well, on this episode of the 4:13, author and Bible teacher Jada Edwards will challenge you to rethink what love is. Because (Spoiler Alert!) we often get love wrong! It's nothing like how the world defines it! So today, Jada explains what love really is and how understanding God's divine version of love can change everything. You'll learn how to tell if you're truly being loving—or just being nice—and five surprising ways to love others the way God intended. So, if you've got someone in your life who's hard to love—or you just want to learn to love others well—listen in! You'll appreciate this deep, grace-filled conversation with my friend, Jada. SHOW NOTES: 413Podcast.com/365  Enter to win the GIVEAWAY and read the episode TRANSCRIPT in the show notes. Get my weekly email, Java with Jennifer, to be notified when a new podcast episode releases. Subscribe HERE.

Pluralism, Conflict, and Jewish Community: A Conversation with Rabbi Ben BergerRabbi Ben Berger, Senior Vice President for Education, Community, and Culture at Hillel International, joins the podcast for a deep dive into Jewish texts, pluralism, disagreement, and the challenges of building community in times of conflict. From the fiery debates of Hillel and Shammai to the complexities of pluralism on today's campuses, we explore what it means to hold conviction and humility at the same time.This episode touches on Talmudic stories, the nature of disagreement, the risks of polarization, and the boundaries of pluralism in relation to Jewish life, weddings, education, Zionism, and community leadership.

What does it mean to belong to the Jewish people in an era of deepening division?In this thought-provoking episode of the Z3 Podcast, host Rabbi Amitai Fraiman is joined by Rabbi Shai Held and Dr. Mijal Bitton as they dive into an expansive conversation on Jewish identity, communal leadership, and the challenges of navigating ideological diversity, especially in the wake of October 7. Together, they grapple with tensions between inclusion and boundary-setting, the evolving role of Israel in Jewish life, and what it means to foster belonging in both liberal and traditional communities. This is a candid and deeply reflective dialogue on the enduring commitment to Klal Yisrael. Watch now to dive into this meaningful conversation between Jewish communal leaders.About Our GuestsDr. Mijal Bitton is a spiritual leader, public intellectual, and sociologist. She serves as the Rosh Kehilla of the Downtown Minyan in NYC and is Scholar in Residence at the Maimonides Fund. A Visiting Researcher at NYU Wagner, she directs pioneering research on Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in the United States. Bitton is an alumna of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship, a New Pluralist Field Builder, and a Sacks Scholar. In the wake of October 7, she is deeply committed to renewing Jewish solidarity and building vibrant, inclusive Jewish life. She was a featured speaker at the historic March for Israel in Washington, D.C. She co-hosts the podcast Wondering Jews and shares weekly reflections on Jewish life, identity, and resilience in her Substack newsletter, Committed.Rabbi Shai Held, one of the most influential Jewish thinkers and leaders in America, is President and Dean of the Hadar Institute in New York City. Rabbi Held received the prestigious Covenant Award for Excellence in Jewish Education, and has been named multiple times to Newsweek's list of the most influential rabbis in America and to the Forward's list of the most prominent Jews in the world. He is the author of Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence (2013) and The Heart of Torah: Essays on the Weekly Torah Portion (2017). His new book, Judaism is About Love, was published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in March 2024.Chapters(00:00) Introduction(10:48) Understanding Community and Leadership(16:45) Redefining Love and Enemies(22:50) Softening the Binary in Community Conversations(28:54) Humanity in Political Discourse(35:52) The Nature of Ideological Boundaries(43:49) The Complexity of Gatekeeping in Jewish Identity(48:52) Secularization and the Role of Israel in Jewish Life(55:52) Balancing Community Standards and Inclusivity(01:01:57) Navigating Complex Identities and Boundaries(01:06:49) The Challenge of Inclusivity in American Jewish Life(01:19:46) Finding Hope Amidst Challenges in Jewish Communities

On this edition of GFA Live, Peter and Keithie talk about WrestleMania 6 from April 1, 1990! (and some other stuff, of course!) Topics of discussion include: * The pacing of the main event: too dull? * Disagreement over Steve Allen again * Crediting Earthquake for causing Gorilla to screw up * Virgil: the hardest working man at WrestleMania 6(!) * The oddity of Jim Duggan waving a US flag at a Canadian WrestleMania while facing a Canadian

On this episode, Patrick and Neel take a look at Manchester City vs Tottenham and how Thomas Frank has impacted Spurs already. Then, Nuno Espírito Santo and Nottingham Forest are in a disagreement over their recruitment, but does his strategy make sense? Next, they look at Crystal Palace's options to replace Eberechi Eze and wrap up the episode discussing Real Madrid's rough start to the season, their inability to create goals from open play, and how they differ from Barcelona. Enjoy! Subscribe to our FREE newsletter: https://www.thetransferflow.com/subscribe Join Variance Betting: https://www.thetransferflow.com/upgrade Follow us on our Socials: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe1WTKOt7byrELQcGRSzu1Q X: https://x.com/TheTransferFlow Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/thetransferflow.bsky.social Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thetransferflow/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@transferflowpodcast Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:19 - Manchester City vs Tottenham takeaways + Tijjani Reijnders 02:19 - City's goalkeeping problem 03:27 - Solving City's buildup? 04:12 - Is Rico Lewis good enough for City? 05:04 - Ederson's absence 06:53 - Thomas Frank's selling point 08:14 - Contrast to the Super Cup 09:02 - The Burnley win 10:15 - Spurs showing versatility 11:25 - Backing spurs to finish top 6? 12:05 - Savinho? 12:56 -Improvements in dribbling vs last season 14:24 - Nottingham Forest's start to the season 15:29 - Disagreement over recruitment 16:30 - Edu and Nuno aren't aligned + recent signings 18:48 - Omari Hutchinson for 40m+? 19:30 - Arnaud Kalimuendo 20:48 - Fullback and GK depth 22:30 - Is Nuno's plan smart? 24:01 - Forest can leapfrog Palace, but they're doing this instead 24:54 - Who do Palace get to replace Eze? 25:28 - Christos Tzolis 27:26 - The right fit for Palace? + high usage player 29:23 - Not an amazing dribbler 31:34 - Does he fit the 3-4-2-1? 33:17 - Yeremy Pino 35:05 - Plugging into Eze's role? 37:04 - Good numbers, but no standout season? 38:08 - Pino or Tzolis? 38:56 - Who runs the attack then? 40:03 - Real Madrid's shaky start to the year 42:00 - Lack of ball movement 43:47 - Contract to Barcelona 44:30 - Real Madrid will have a better defence than Barca 45:22 - Super left biased 46:00 - Mbappe at striker is underrated? 46:40 - Hayden's idea to sell Vinicius 47:50 - When rubbish shots are ok 48:53 - Good counter pressing and defensive structure? 50:15 - Guler midfield experiment 51:12 - Lots of defensive work even against a weak side? 52:10 - Interesting to see them vs stronger teams 52:48 - Lamine Yamal shot selection

Pastors Justin Alexander and Eric Williamson continue a new series based on Rosaria Butterfield's book, Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age.This episode was recorded live during the Wednesday Night Bible Study at FBC Hendersonville, NC, on August 20, 2025.

Today's disagreement is about US Selective Public High Schools. These schools, also known as “Exam Schools”, are elite publicly funded high schools that have historically relied on a single entrance exam to determine admission.  You've likely heard of many of them:In Boston, you have Boston Latin, the oldest public high school in the country. Alums include Ben Franklin and Sam Adams. In New York: You've got Stuyvesant, whose alums include U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, and, of coruse, Timothy Chalamet. New York also has The Bronx High School of Science, whose alums have more Nobel prizes (9) than any other high school in the world. In Northern Virginia, there's Thomas Jefferson (or TJ), established in 1985 and one of the newest selective high schools. It has spent many years rated the #1 High School in the Country by U.S. News and World Report.In the episode, we ask a number of questions: What is the purpose of these schools? Should they exist? Are standardized entrance exams the best path to meritocratic admissions? How concerned should we be about diversity and equity and whether student bodies are representative of their surrounding communities?Ian Rowe is the CEO and cofounder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a virtues-based International Baccalaureate high school in the Bronx. He is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent books is “Agency: The Four Point Plan (F.R.E.E.) for ALL Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative and Discover Their Pathway to Power”Stefan Redding Lollinger is the Executive Director of Next100, a multi-issue, progressive policy think tank. He's a Scholar in Residence at American University and the first Director of a Century Foundation initiative to advance diversity and integration in schools and neighborhoods. Questions or comments about this episode? Email us at podcast@thedisagreement.com or find us on X and Instagram @thedisagreementhq. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://thedisagreement.substack.com/

We can learn a valuable lesson from Barnabas and Paul when it comes to handling disagreements. It is important  when facing a conflict, to work towards a resolution. Seek to understand the other person's viewpoint and find a reasonable compromise.  When we let God have His way in our relationships, rather than demanding our own way, we bring glory and honor to His name, which is our highest goal.  By Dave Bartlett

Historian Kevin Impellizeri shares a story of a video game controversy to his friends: Kate Lynch and Andy Hunter. We wrap up our discussion of Uwe Boll's 2007 film Postal by examining the film's critical and audience reception at the time of its release. This will help set the stage for Uwe's multiple attempts to make a sequel to the video game movie audiences didn't seem to hate as much as his other movies. Topics discussed include: Uwe gets big mad at critics, Uwe should probably get a new publicist, Kevin's lukewarm takes on an 18-year-old flop, and we look at Uwe Boll vs. Chris Koehler of Wired in another installment of Scandalous Games Theatre.More info, including show notes and sources at http://scandalousgamespodcast.wordpress.com. 

Anyone who has been serving as a missionary for very long knows that missionaries disagree on many issues from time to time! We even find disagreements in the pages of the book of Acts. Listen in as we share 4 biblical principles to apply when we disagree with coworkers, and some practical tips we have learned over the years as well. 

8-12 Former QB and 49ers pre/post host Todd Husak weighs in on if there is any concern with WR room as injuries and contract disagreements drag on through preseasonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

8-12 Former QB and 49ers pre/post host Todd Husak weighs in on if there is any concern with WR room as injuries and contract disagreements drag on through preseasonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Disagreements around money in marriage can trigger anxiety, conflict, and even long-term damage if left unspoken. So how can couples move from financial tension to emotional connection? In this “Best of MKM” episode from 2019, psychiatrist Dr. Laura Dabney shares her insights on why money arguments go deeper than dollars—and how to address the feelings behind the finances. Dr. Dabney explains why our childhood experiences shape our money mindset, how to express emotions without blame, and what to do when your spouse isn't on the same page. Whether it's a surprise boat purchase or hidden debt, she offers tools to help couples move beyond the surface and truly communicate. This conversation is full of “a-ha” moments and practical advice for parents and partners trying to build trust and teamwork. If disagreements around money in marriage are stressing you out, this episode with Dr. Laura Dabney is a must-listen. Resources ⁠⁠Sponsors, Deals and Partners⁠⁠ MKM RESOURCES: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Own Your Time⁠: Pre-order my first book today! ⁠MKM Coaching⁠⁠⁠⁠: Want 1-on-1 support with your family finance journey? Book a time with me today. ⁠⁠⁠⁠Coast FIRE Calculator⁠⁠⁠⁠: A free calculator to help you find out when you can slow down or stop investing for retirement. ⁠⁠⁠⁠Mortgage Payoff Calculator⁠⁠⁠⁠: A free calculator to help you see how fast you can become mortgage free. ⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠: Subscribe for free to watch videos of these episodes and interviews. RECOMMENDED RESOURCES (SPONSORS AND AFFILIATES): ⁠⁠⁠⁠Monarch Money⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Best Budget App for Families & Couples ⁠⁠⁠⁠Empower⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Free Portfolio Tracker ⁠⁠⁠Cr⁠ew⁠⁠⁠⁠ - HYSA Banking Built for Families - Get an Extra 0.5% APY with my partner link ⁠⁠⁠⁠Ethos⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Affordable Term Life Insurance ⁠⁠⁠⁠Trust & Will⁠⁠⁠ ⁠- Convenient Estate Planning CHAPTERS 00:00 – How emotions—not dollars—spark financial fights 01:40 – Introduction to Dr. Laura Dabney 03:00 – Childhood roots of money conflict 04:30 – Learning to identify and express feelings 06:30 – How to talk about big purchases 09:00 – Communication strategy: “I feel X when you do Y” 11:30 – Making time for emotional check-ins as parents 13:45 – How tech affects emotional connection 15:30 – Red flags to watch in serious relationships 17:30 – Boundaries and when to seek therapy 20:00 – Counseling alone when your spouse won't come 22:30 – Why money classes may miss the root issue 24:00 – Dr. Dabney's book recommendations and resources HOW WE MAKE MONEY + DISCLAIMER: This show may contain affiliate links or links from our advertisers where we earn a commission, direct payment or products. Opinions are the creators alone. Information shared on this podcast is for entertainment purposes only and should not be considered as professional advice. Marriage Kids and Money (www.marriagekidsandmoney.com) is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. CREDITS: Podcast Artwork: Liz Theresa Editor: Johnny Sohl Podcast Support: Andy Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Political disagreements are rarely settled and often end in a stalemate where each party believes the other is just obviously wrong. Justin leads a discussion about ways to defuse political disagreements by taking a look at what kinds of beliefs political theories consist of, focusing on how and where we might move the needle

Misunderstanding vs Disagreement — Why It Matters Misunderstanding vs disagreement? When conflict arises, the way you diagnose the problem determines how effectively you can solve it. Is it a misunderstanding, where miscommunication is the real culprit? Or is it a disagreement, where you and the other person genuinely see things differently? Understanding this distinction can […] The post #85 – Misunderstanding vs. Disagreement: How to Identify the Root of Any Conflict appeared first on MIND FOR LIFE.

In this conversation, Kyle Thompson discusses his journey in creating Undaunted Life and The Daily Blade, focusing on the need for a strong, biblical masculinity among Christian men. He explores the cultural influences that have led to a perceived softness in Christian masculinity, the importance of creating man-friendly churches, and the role of physical health in a man's life. The discussion also highlights the significance of equipping men to push back against darkness in society and the success of The Daily Blade as a daily devotional for men. Want more of Kyle's content? Access The Daily Blade   Know more about Sathiya's work: GET A FREE COPY OF THE LAST RELAPSE JOIN DEEP CLEAN INNER CIRCLE Submit A Question (Anonymously) Through This Form Watch Sathiya on Youtube For More Content Like This   Chapters:  (00:00) Introduction to Undaunted Life (03:02) The Evolution of Christian Masculinity (05:50) Cultural Influences on Masculinity (09:04) Creating a Man-Friendly Church Environment (11:48) The Role of Truth in Church Leadership (14:55) Navigating Modern Cultural Shifts (17:47) The Impact of Messaging on Audience Reception (21:03) Engaging in Healthy Discourse (23:53) Conclusion and Final Thoughts (27:43) Engaging in Honest Conversations (29:56) Intellectual Honesty and Disagreement (32:31) Understanding Biblical Identity (35:40) The Role of Expository Preaching (39:51) Raising Children with Biblical Values (43:23) The Dangers of Youth Sports and Technology (46:54) The Importance of Physical Health (50:39) Introducing The Daily Blade Podcast

Send Wilk a text with your feedback!DTH Episode 275 with Neil Ghosh — Purpose, Empathy, and Engaged CitizenshipThis week, Wilk is joined by Neil Ghosh - author, executive, and social impact strategist, for a powerful conversation on purpose, empathy, and building a meaningful legacy. From the immigrant experience to small acts of micro-altruism, Neil shares personal stories and actionable insights that remind us why active participation in democracy and community is more important than ever.

Join co-hosts Rachael and Melissa in this “best of” episode as they discuss the complexities of sibling arguments and how to guide your daughters through them with grace and wisdom. In this replay episode of the Raising Godly Girls Podcast, we discuss practical strategies rooted in Biblical principles to help your daughters navigate disagreements with their siblings. Featuring insights from American Heritage Girls Founder & Executive Director Patti Garibay, we explore the importance of cultivating a heart filled with the Fruit of the Spirit and the power of gentle, kind communication.  Tune in as we share personal anecdotes, Biblical examples, and effective ways to foster healthy conflict resolution in your home. Learn how to equip your daughters with the tools they need to handle disagreements gracefully, ensuring they build strong, loving relationships with their siblings. Don't miss this insightful and encouraging episode designed to support you in raising Godly girls who can navigate the challenges of sibling rivalry with faith and wisdom.  Find an American Heritage Girls Troop near you, visit americanheritagegirls.org       Add even more Biblical wisdom to your parenting quiver, visit raisinggodlygirls.com 

This is a Patreon Episode Check out our visuals and support the Pod: patreon.com/TogetherRealBad      

Is America approaching the point where peaceful reform is no longer enough? In this powerful episode of The P.A.S. Report Podcast, Professor Nick Giordano responds to a listener's bold question: do the government's abuses rise to the level the Founders warned about? Drawing from the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the Founders' own words, Professor Giordano separates policy disagreements from true tyranny. He also explains how we can still fight back using the tools built into the Constitution. From censorship and lawfare to the Chevron ruling and the rise of the Fourth Branch, this episode is a wake-up call for every American who senses something is deeply wrong. Episode Highlights: A listener's powerful question sparks a deep dive into whether America's government abuses justify revolution or demand reform How the Founders defined tyranny, what "a long train of abuses" really means, and how modern examples like the CIA spying on Congress and the Russia hoax measure up Why the Supreme Court's reversal of the Chevron doctrine marks a historic turning point in reining in the unelected Fourth Branch of government

From idea to IPO and beyond. What does it take to back a company for nearly two decades?There are no written rules to navigate one of the most important relationships in a startup. One between a founder and an investor.This episode is an inside look at how one of India's longest founder-investor relationships was built and tested, between Yashish Dahiya (Policybazaar) and Sanjeev Bikhchandani (Info Edge).In 2008, a ₹20 crore cheque was signed for 49 percent of the company, based solely on a powerpoint idea.What followed were regulatory challenges, shifting business models, new investors on-board, and moments of disagreement. But through 17 years, six funding rounds, and an IPO, they stayed aligned.These are two entrepreneurs who built their first ventures a decade apart; Sanjeev in 1997, Yashish in 2008 and have seen the Indian startup ecosystem evolve from the ground up.If you are building or funding startups this conversation will resonate with you for its honesty and give takeaways for your own journey.0:00 – Infoedge Ventures X Policybazaar1:08 – Sanjeev's first memories of Yashish before Policybazaar5:33 – Pitching of the Policybazaar idea 11:08 – How Info Edge almost didn't invest in Policybazaar15:56 – What shaped Yashish as Founder & Sanjeev as Investor25:14 – How the founder–investor bond evolved 27:08 – The Boardroom Dynamics at Policybazaar31:08 – Moments of Disagreement: ₹840 Cr raised, ₹700 Cr still in the bank34:38 – What makes an investor-founder relationship work?46:02 – What We've Learned after 17 years of building together49:03 – How India can build Long-term founder-investor bonds-------------India's talent has built the world's tech—now it's time to lead it.This mission goes beyond startups. It's about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.What is Neon Fund?We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that's done it before.Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we're doing it all at Neon.-------------Check us out on:Website: https://neon.fund/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShowwConnect with Siddhartha on:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7-------------This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.Send us a text

A sermon on how we must keep together and show love even when we disagree. Can we help you with your walk with God? We'd love to hear from you! https://www.thebibleway.com/contact 

Foundations of Amateur Radio Every single radio amateur has come to this hobby with an itch to scratch. Time and again I've seen amateurs around me pursue that particular purpose, only to come out the other end with a look of bewilderment writ large across their face. For some amateurs it means the end of their involvement in the hobby, for others it starts a new journey into the unknown. One of the ways we explore our community is by travelling out of our shack into the big outdoors in whatever form that takes. Popular activities include setting up a radio in a location and talking to others, known colloquially as an "activation". We do this all over the planet. Perhaps the most recognisable of these is IOTA, or Islands On The Air, where a station is erected on an island and contacts are made. As amateurs we cannot help ourselves and seem to have an insatiable need to measure our prowess. We do this by counting how many contacts, callsigns, countries, grid-squares, or in this case, islands, we've managed to put in the log. If an island represents a new callsign, a new country, and a new grid-square, the contact making will turn into a feeding frenzy that can last for days, especially if the station offers multiple bands and modes, making the effort all the more tempting. We don't stop with islands. Summits, with Summits On The Air or SOTA are popular, as are Parks, POTA, and even over a weekend, the International Lighthouse and Lightship Weekend, or ILLW. Some of these activations follow rules set out by amateurs like you and I, who thought it would be fun to track such activations and encourage others to participate. For example IOTA World publishes a four page document outlining what's required for those on the island, activators, and those trying to make contact, or chasers. This raises an important point. Rules require documentation, which leads to discussion and disagreement, and versions. I can show you two versions of the IOTA World rules, neither is dated, of course both are different, so if you're going to publish rules, make sure you add a date or version, preferably both, to the rules document. Disagreements aside, sometimes there are multiple programs with the same name or aims. Two groups came up with the same idea and didn't know about each other, or, a group in a different country wanted to run the show in a different way and a new group was formed. I'm mentioning this because sometimes these groups are antagonistic towards each other and have forgotten that the whole point of this is to have fun. So, what else can we activate? Well, there's Castles and Stately Homes, Bunkers, Beaches, Museums, Walmart Parking Lots and even Toilets On The Air, mind you, Slow Scan Television, or SSTV is discouraged as a mode. The other day the power was off for maintenance in my street and I planned on escaping to the local library, which caused me to search for libraries across Perth. It seems there's pretty much one in every suburb and I considered the notion of activating a library or three, comes with easy access to public transport, a car park, and even toilet facilities, what's not to like? I wondered what might be a suitable exchange so it could incorporate the library itself, promoting amateur radio and libraries, two birds and all. I made a comment on mastodon.radio and it turns out that Frank K4FMH beat me to it, several years ago. Libraries On The Air, or LiOTA. I've been hunting for a dataset of libraries in Australia to give to Frank, but it's been slim pickings, despite there being over 10,000 of them, apparently around 10% of those public. It raises another question, is there a directory of activation types anywhere? I couldn't find one, so I started a list on my GitHub repository. Feel free to add any I missed. Toilet jokes aside, consider that TOTA is being held during the annual Hackers On Planet Earth conference and it will introduce new people to our amateur community, which ultimately might be the best reason to have fun, get on-air and make noise. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

In this episode I am joined by Victor Shiryaev a teacher of Buddhist and modern meditation and somatic practices. Victor recounts his childhood in the Soviet Union, early underground exposure to the New Age, and subsequent study of Avaita Vedānta and Ken Wilber's Integral Theory. Victor details his discipleship under American mindfulness teacher Shinzen Young, reflects on the tension between tradition and innovation, and shares stories of his own awakening experiences. Victor also lays out his disagreements with Shinzen Young's approach, critiques the Pragmatic Dharma's use of maps and stages, and presents his own understanding of the spiritual experiences to be expected on the road to awakening and beyond. … Video version: https://www.guruviking.com/podcast/ep318-modern-mindfulness-victor-shiryaev Also available on Youtube, iTunes, & Spotify – search ‘Guru Viking Podcast'.
 … Topics include: 00:00 - Intro 00:56 - Childhood in the Soviet Union 02:24 - Exposure to the New Age and psychotherapy 07:15 - Studying Chinese History at university 08:07 - Advaita Vedānta and Ken Wilber 09:18 - Unity experience 10:21 - Altered states and psychic phenomena 13:14 - Personal crisis 14:52 - Awakening in Myanmar 17:19 - “I know what I have is working” 19:17 - Meeting Shinzen Young and adopting his model 24:50 - Observational statistics 27:29 - Studying with Shinzen 29:27 - Divorce and launching meditation teaching career 31:00 - Finding a path thru crisis 37:10 - Writing a letter to nature 42:48 - Finding purpose in spirituality 44:15 - Victor's teaching approach and activities 48:58 - Why go deeper in practice? 51:17 - Creating a culture of openness 58:33 - Shinzen & Ken Wilber vs Victor 01:05:16 - Being a clear conduit 01:19:32 - I am not a Buddhist teacher 01:12:40 - Experience vs faith 01:15:58 - Disagreements with Shinzen 01:17:43 - Disagreements with Theravāda 01:19:32 - Shinzen's modernism and scientism 01:25:19 - Steve's understanding of Shinzen 01:28:15 - Victor's update on Shinzen's scientism 01:30:50 - Heretics and reformers 01:33:39 - Fundamentalism and the world-centred view 01:30:39 - A world-centred view is also fundamentalist 01:42:50 - Victor on the Pragmatic Dharma movement 01:46:55 - Hypocrisy of Pragmatic Dharma 01:49:29 - Traditional vs modern practitioners 01:58:13 - Critique of maps and stages 02:06:18 - First stage: thoughts to presence 02:09:41 - Second stage: all experience is consciousness 02:12:09 - One taste 02:13:38 - Intimacy with all things 02:15:26 - The consciousness trap 02:18:18 - We shape our experience 02:19:10 - The pregnant void 02:22:32 - Victor's view of the path To find out more about Victor Shiryaev, visit: - https://victorshiryaev.co/ … For more interviews, videos, and more visit: - www.guruviking.com Music ‘Deva Dasi' by Steve James

Head Referee Adam Levitan proceeds over the biggest event of the year: 2025 Man vs. Machine. In one corner - Evan Silva, representing men who sometimes mow their own lawns and touch grass. In the other - Michael Leone, representing the machine, the spreadsheets and the virgins. In this episode, we discuss:- Who does Head Referee Levitan award he victory to?- Why is Evan so low on CMC?- What makes Brian Thomas Jr. warrant the 7th overall pick?- Has Jaylen Waddle cleared Tyreek Hill as WR1 in Miami?- Can you overlook Chris Olave's concussion history?Timestamps:0:00 - Intro 3:38 - Jameson Williams8:32 - Trey McBride12:16 - Kenneth Walker16:33 - Christian Kirk21:40 - Christian McCaffrey27:51 - Chris Olave33:33 - Jayden Blue38:07 - Tony Pollard42:11 - Jaylen Warren46:54 - Matthew Golden52:32 - Justin Fields56:09 - Jerry Jeudy1:01:39 - Jake Ferguson1:04:43 - Tetairoa McMillan1:09:46 - Trevor Lawrence1:14:50 - Jaylen Waddle1:19:53 - Jahmyr Gibbs1:27:41 - Brian Thomas Jr. 1:32:22 - Jaxon Smith-Njigba1:38:24 - Ricky PearsallWant ETR on your team this season? Our 2025 NFL Draft Kit Pro has you covered with:Draft Rankings & TiersResearch & Analysis ArticlesDraft Strategy ContentIn-Season Roster ManagementTrade CalculatorsDiscord CommunitySubscribe now at https://subscribe.establishtherun.com/nfldraftkitpro/ Download the DraftKings Daily Fantasy app now to draft your $20 Best Ball lineup to play for a share of $15 million—and get a second ticket to play FREE for a share of $15 million. That's two chances to win big without ever setting your lineup again. Draft One, Get One—only on DraftKings. The Crown Is Yours.https://dkng.co/BestBallETR Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or 877-8-HOPENY/text HOPENY (467369) (NY). Help is available for problem gambling. Call (888) 789-7777 or visit ccpg.org (CT).

We've covered the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, pretty consistently on Statecraft, since our first interview on PEPFAR, the flagship anti-AIDS program, in 2023. When DOGE came to USAID, I was extremely critical of the cuts to lifesaving aid, and the abrupt, pointlessly harmful ways in which they were enacted. In March, I wrote, “The DOGE team has axed the most effective and efficient programs at USAID, and forced out the chief economist, who was brought in to oversee a more aggressive push toward efficiency.”Today, we're talking to that forced-out chief economist, Dean Karlan. Dean spent two and a half years at the helm of the first-ever Office of the Chief Economist at USAID. In that role, he tried to help USAID get better value from its foreign aid spending. His office shifted $1.7 billion of spending towards programs with stronger evidence of effectiveness. He explains how he achieved this, building a start-up within a massive bureaucracy. I should note that Dean is one of the titans of development economics, leading some of the most important initiatives in the field (I won't list them, but see here for details), and I think there's a plausible case he deserves a Nobel.Throughout this conversation, Dean makes a point much better than I could: the status quo at USAID needed a lot of improvement. The same political mechanisms that get foreign aid funded by Congress also created major vulnerabilities for foreign aid, vulnerabilities that DOGE seized on. Dean believes foreign aid is hugely valuable, a good thing for us to spend our time, money, and resources on. But there's a lot USAID could do differently to make its marginal dollar spent more efficient.DOGE could have made USAID much more accountable and efficient by listening to people like Dean, and reformers of foreign aid should think carefully about Dean's criticisms of USAID, and his points for how to make foreign aid not just resilient but politically popular in the long term.We discuss* What does the Chief Economist do?* Why does 170% percent of USAID funds come already earmarked by Congress?* Why is evaluating program effectiveness institutionally difficult?* Why don't we just do cash transfers for everything?* Why institutions like USAID have trouble prioritizing* Should USAID get rid of gender/environment/fairness in procurement rules?* Did it rely too much on a small group of contractors?* What's changed in development economics over the last 20 years?* Should USAID spend more on governance and less on other forms of aid? * How DOGE killed USAID — and how to bring it back better* Is depoliticizing foreign aid even possible?* Did USAID build “soft power” for the United States?This is a long conversation: you can jump to a specific section with the index above. If you just want to hear about Dean's experience with DOGE, you can click here or go to the 45-minute mark in the audio. And if you want my abbreviated summary of the conversation, see these two Twitter threads. But I think the full conversation is enlightening, especially if you want to understand the American foreign aid system. Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood for his judicious edits.Our past coverage of USAIDDean, I'm curious about the limits of your authority. What can the Chief Economist of USAID do? What can they make people do?There had never been an Office of the Chief Economist before. In a sense, I was running a startup, within a 13,000-employee agency that had fairly baked-in, decentralized processes for doing things.Congress would say, "This is how much to spend on this sector and these countries." What you actually fund was decided by missions in the individual countries. It was exciting to have that purview across the world and across many areas, not just economic development, but also education, social protection, agriculture. But the reality is, we were running a consulting unit within USAID, trying to advise others on how to use evidence more effectively in order to maximize impact for every dollar spent.We were able to make some institutional changes, focused on basically a two-pronged strategy. One, what are the institutional enablers — the rules and the processes for how things get done — that are changeable? And two, let's get our hands dirty working with the budget holders who say, "I would love to use the evidence that's out there, please help guide us to be more effective with what we're doing."There were a lot of willing and eager people within USAID. We did not lack support to make that happen. We never would've achieved anything, had there not been an eager workforce who heard our mission and knocked on our door to say, "Please come help us do that."What do you mean when you say USAID has decentralized processes for doing things?Earmarks and directives come down from Congress. [Some are] about sector: $1 billion dollars to spend on primary school education to improve children's learning outcomes, for instance. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) [See our interview with former PEPFAR lead Mark Dybul] is one of the biggest earmarks to spend money specifically on specific diseases. Then there's directives that come down about how to allocate across countries.Those are two conversations I have very little engagement on, because some of that comes from Congress. It's a very complicated, intertwined set of constraints that are then adhered to and allocated to the different countries. Then what ends up happening is — this is the decentralized part — you might be a Foreign Service Officer (FSO) working in a country, your focus is education, and you're given a budget for that year from the earmark for education and told, "Go spend $80 million on a new award in education." You're working to figure out, “How should we spend that?” There might be some technical support from headquarters, but ultimately, you're responsible for making those decisions. Part of our role was to help guide those FSOs towards programs that had more evidence of effectiveness.Could you talk more about these earmarks? There's a popular perception that USAID decides what it wants to fund. But these big categories of humanitarian aid, or health, or governance, are all decided in Congress. Often it's specific congressmen or congresswomen who really want particular pet projects to be funded.That's right. And the number that I heard is that something in the ballpark of 150-170% of USAID funds were earmarked. That might sound horrible, but it's not.How is that possible?Congress double-dips, in a sense: we have two different demands. You must spend money on these two things. If the same dollar can satisfy both, that was completely legitimate. There was no hiding of that fact. It's all public record, and it all comes from congressional acts that create these earmarks. There's nothing hidden underneath the hood.Will you give me examples of double earmarking in practice? What kinds of goals could you satisfy with the same dollar?There's an earmark for Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) to do research, and an earmark for education. If DIV is going to fund an evaluation of something in the education space, there's a possibility that that can satisfy a dual earmark requirement. That's the kind of thing that would happen. One is an earmark for a process: “Do really careful, rigorous evaluations of interventions, so that we learn more about what works and what doesn't." And another is, "Here's money that has to be spent on education." That would be an example of a double dip on an earmark.And within those categories, the job of Chief Economist was to help USAID optimize the funding? If you're spending $2 billion on education, “Let's be as effective with that money as possible.”That's exactly right. We had two teams, Evidence Use and Evidence Generation. It was exactly what it sounds like. If there was an earmark for $1 billion dollars on education, the Evidence Use team worked to do systematic analysis: “What is the best evidence out there for what works for education for primary school learning outcomes?” Then, “How can we map that evidence to the kinds of things that USAID funds? What are the kinds of questions that need to be figured out?”It's not a cookie-cutter answer. A systematic review doesn't say, "Here's the intervention. Now just roll it out everywhere." We had to work with the missions — with people who know the local area — to understand, “What is the local context? How do you appropriately adapt this program in a procurement and contextualize it to that country, so that you can hire people to use that evidence?”Our Evidence Generation team was trying to identify knowledge gaps where the agency could lead in producing more knowledge about what works and what doesn't. If there was something innovative that USAID was funding, we were huge advocates of, "Great, let's contribute to the global public good of knowledge, so that we can learn more in the future about what to do, and so others can learn from us. So let's do good, careful evaluations."Being able to demonstrate what good came of an intervention also serves the purpose of accountability. But I've never been a fan of doing really rigorous evaluations just for the sake of accountability. It could discourage innovation and risk-taking, because if you fail, you'd be seen as a failure, rather than as a win for learning that an idea people thought was reasonable didn't turn out to work. It also probably leads to overspending on research, rather than doing programs. If you're doing something just for accountability purposes, you're better off with audits. "Did you actually deliver the program that you said you would deliver, or not?"Awards over $100 million dollars did go through the front office of USAID for approval. We added a process — it was actually a revamped old process — where they stopped off in my office. We were able to provide guidance on the cost-effectiveness of proposals that would then be factored into the decision on whether to proceed. When I was first trying to understand Project 2025, because we saw that as a blueprint for what changes to expect, one of the changes they proposed was actually that process. I remember thinking to myself, "We just did that. Hopefully this change that they had in mind when they wrote that was what we actually put in place." But I thought of it as a healthy process that had an impact, not just on that one award, but also in helping set an example for smaller awards of, “This is how to be more evidence-based in what you're doing.”[Further reading: Here's a position paper Karlan's office at USAID put out in 2024 on how USAID should evaluate cost-effectiveness.]You've also argued that USAID should take into account more research that has already been done on global development and humanitarian aid. Your ideal wouldn't be for USAID to do really rigorous research on every single thing it does. You can get a lot better just by incorporating things that other people have learned.That's absolutely right. I can say this as a researcher: to no one's surprise, it's more bureaucratic to work with the government as a research funder than it is to work with foundations and nimble NGOs. If I want to evaluate a particular program, and you give me a choice of who the funder should be, the only reason I would choose government is if it had a faster on-ramp to policy by being inside.The people who are setting policy should not be putting more weight on evidence that they paid for. In fact, one of the slogans that I often used at USAID is, "Evidence doesn't care who pays for it." We shouldn't be, as an agency, putting more weight on the things that we evaluated vs. things that others evaluated without us, and that we can learn from, mimic, replicate, and scale.We — and the we here is everyone, researchers and policymakers — put too much weight on individual studies, in a horrible way. The first to publish on something gets more accolades than the second, third and fourth. That's not healthy when it comes to policy. If we put too much weight on our own evidence, we end up putting too much weight on individual studies we happen to do. That's not healthy either.That was one of the big pieces of culture change that we tried to push internally at USAID. We had this one slide that we used repeatedly that showed the plethora of evidence out there in the world compared to 20 years ago. A lot more studies are now usable. You can aggregate that evidence and form much better policies.You had political support to innovate that not everybody going into government has. On the other hand, USAID is a big, bureaucratic entity. There are all kinds of cross-pressures against being super-effective per dollar spent. In doing culture change, what kinds of roadblocks did you run into internally?We had a lot of support and political cover, in the sense that the political appointees — I was not a political appointee — were huge fans. But political appointees under Republicans have also been huge fans of what we were doing. Disagreements are more about what to do and what causes to choose. But the basic idea of being effective with your dollars to push your policy agenda is something that cuts across both sides.In the days leading up to the inauguration, we were expecting to continue the work we were doing. Being more cost-effective was something some of the people who were coming in were huge advocates for. They did make progress under Trump I in pushing USAID in that direction. We saw ourselves as able to help further that goal. Obviously, that's not the way it played out, but there isn't really anything political about being more cost-effective.We'll come back to that, but I do want to talk about the 2.5 years you spent in the Biden administration. USAID is full of people with all kinds of incentives, including some folks who were fully on board and supportive. What kinds of challenges did you have in trying to change the culture to be more focused on evidence and effectiveness?There was a fairly large contingent of people who welcomed us, were eager, understood the space that we were coming from and the things that we wanted, and greeted us with open arms. There's no way we would've accomplished what we accomplished without that. We had a bean counter within the Office of the Chief Economist of moving about $1.7 billion towards programs that were more effective or had strong evaluations. That would've been $0 had there not been some individuals who were already eager and just didn't have the path for doing it.People can see economists as people who are going to come in negative and a bit dismal — the dismal science, so to speak. I got into economics for a positive reason. We tried as often as possible to show that with an economic lens, we can help people achieve their goals better, period. We would say repeatedly to people, "We're not here to actually make the difficult choices: to say whether health, education, or food security is the better use of money. We're here to accept your goal and help you achieve more of it for your dollar spent.” We always send a very disarming message: we're there simply to help people achieve their goals and to illuminate the trade-offs that naturally exist.Within USAID, you have a consensus-type organization. When you have 10 people sitting around a room trying to decide how to spend money towards a common goal, if you don't crystallize the trade-offs between the various ideas being put forward, you end up seeing a consensus built: that everybody gets a piece of the pie. Our way of trying to shift the culture is to take those moments and say, "Wait a second. All 10 might be good ideas relative to doing nothing, but they can't all be good relative to each other. We all share a common goal, so let's be clear about the trade-offs between these different programs. Let's identify the ones that are actually getting you the most bang for your buck."Can you give me an example of what those trade-offs might be in a given sector?Sure. Let's take social protection, what we would call the Humanitarian Nexus development space. It might be working in a refugee area — not dealing with the immediate crisis, but one, two, five, or ten years later — trying to help bring the refugees into a more stable environment and into economic activities. Sometimes, you would see some cash or food provided to households. The programs would all have the common goal of helping to build a sustainable livelihood for households, so that they can be more integrated into the local economy. There might be programs providing water, financial instruments like savings vehicles, and supporting vocational education. It'd be a myriad of things, all on this focused goal of income-generating activity for the households to make them more stable in the long run.Often, those kinds of programs doing 10 different things did not actually lead to an observable impact over five years. But a more focused approach has gone through evaluations: cash transfers. That's a good example where “reducing” doesn't always mean reduce your programs just to one thing, but there is this default option of starting with a base case: “What does a cash transfer generate?"And to clarify for people who don't follow development economics, the cash transfer is just, “What if we gave people money?”Sometimes it is just that. Sometimes it's thinking strategically, “Maybe we should do it as a lump sum so that it goes into investments. Maybe we should do it with a planning exercise to make those investments.” Let's just call it “cash-plus,” or “cash-with-a-little-plus,” then variations of that nature. There's a different model, maybe call it, “cash-plus-plus,” called the graduation model. That has gone through about 30 randomized trials, showing pretty striking impacts on long-run income-generating activity for households. At its core is a cash transfer, usually along with some training about income-generating activity — ideally one that is producing and exporting in some way, even a local export to the capital — and access to some form of savings. In some cases, that's an informal savings group, with a community that comes and saves together. In some cases, it's mobile money that's the core. It's a much simpler program, and it's easier to do it at scale. It has generated considerable, measured, repeatedly positive impacts, but not always. There's a lot more that needs to be learned about how to do it more effectively.[Further reading: Here's another position paper from Karlan's team at USAID on benchmarking against cash transfers.]One of your recurring refrains is, “If we're not sure that these other ideas have an impact, let's benchmark: would a cash-transfer model likely give us more bang for our buck than this panoply of other programs that we're trying to run?”The idea of having a benchmark is a great approach in general. You should always be able to beat X. X might be different in different contexts. In a lot of cases, cash is the right benchmark.Go back to education. What's your benchmark for improving learning outcomes for a primary school? Cash transfer is not the right benchmark. The evidence that cash transfers will single-handedly move the needle on learning outcomes is not that strong. On the other hand, a couple of different programs — one called Teaching at the Right Level, another called structured pedagogy — have proven repeatedly to generate very strong impacts at a fairly modest cost. In education, those should be the benchmark. If you want to innovate, great, innovate. But your goal is to beat those. If you can beat them consistently, you become the benchmark. That's a great process for the long run. It's very much part of our thinking about what the future of foreign aid should look like: to be structured around that benchmark.Let's go back to those roundtables you described, where you're trying to figure out what the intervention should be for a group of refugees in a foreign country. What were the responses when you'd say, “Look, if we're all pulling in the same direction, we have to toss out the three worst ideas”?One of the challenges is the psychology of ethics. There's probably a word for this, but one of the objections we would often get was about the scale of a program for an individual. Someone would argue, "But this won't work unless you do this one extra thing." That extra thing might be providing water to the household, along with a cash transfer for income-generating activity, financial support, and bank accounts. Another objection would be that, "You also have to provide consumption and food up to a certain level."These are things that individually might be good, relative to nothing, or maybe even relative to other water approaches or cash transfers. But if you're focused on whether to satisfy the household's food needs, or provide half of what's needed — if all you're thinking about is the trade-off between full and half — you immediately jump to this idea that, "No, we have to go full. That's what's needed to help this household." But if you go to half, you can help more people. There's an actual trade-off: 10,000 people will receive nothing because you're giving more to the people in your program.The same is true for nutritional supplements. Should you provide 2,000 calories a day, or 1,000 calories a day to more people? It's a very difficult conversation on the psychology of ethics. There's this idea that people in a program are sacrosanct, and you must do everything you can for them. But that ignores all the people who are not being reached at all.I would find myself in conversations where that's exactly the way I would try to put it. I would say, "Okay, wait, we have the 2,000,000 people that are eligible for this program in this context. Our program is only going to reach 250,000. That's the reality. Now, let's talk about how many people we're willing to leave untouched and unhelped whatsoever." That was, at least to me, the right way to frame this question. Do you go very intense for fewer people or broader support for more people?Did that help these roundtables reach consensus, or at least have a better sense of what things are trading off against each other?I definitely saw movement for some. I wouldn't say it was uniform, and these are difficult conversations. But there was a lot of appetite for this recognition that, as big as USAID was, it was still small, relative to the problems being approached. There were a lot of people in any given crisis who were being left unhelped. The minute you're able to help people focus more on those big numbers, as daunting as they are, I would see more openness to looking at the evidence to figure out how to do the most good with the resources we have?” We must recognize these inherent trade-offs, whether we like it or not.Back in 2023, you talked to Dylan Matthews at Vox — it's a great interview — about how it's hard to push people to measure cost-effectiveness, when it means adding another step to a big, complicated bureaucratic process of getting aid out the door. You said,"There are also bandwidth issues. There's a lot of competing demands. Some of these demands relate to important issues on gender environment, fairness in the procurement process. These add steps to the process that need to be adhered to. What you end up with is a lot of overworked people. And then you're saying, ‘Here's one more thing to do.'”Looking back, what do you think of those demands on, say, fairness in the procurement process?Given that we're going to be facing a new environment, there probably are some steps in the process that — hopefully, when things are put back in place in some form — someone can be thinking more carefully about. It's easier to put in a cleaner process that avoids some of these hiccups when you start with a blank slate.Having said that, it's also going to be fewer people to dole out less money. There's definitely a challenge that we're going to be facing as a country, to push out money in an effective way with many fewer people for oversight. I don't think it would be accurate to say we achieved this goal yet, but my goal was to make it so that adding cost-effectiveness was actually a negative-cost addition to the process. [We wanted] to do it in a way that successfully recognized that it wasn't a cookie-cutter solution from up top for every country. But [our goal was that] the work to contextualize in a country actually simplified the process for whoever's putting together the procurement docs and deciding what to put in them. I stand by that belief that if it's done well, we can make this a negative-cost process change.I just want to push a little bit. Would you be supportive of a USAID procurement and contracting process that stripped out a bunch of these requirements about gender, environment, or fairness in contracting? Would that make USAID a more effective institution?Some of those types of things did serve an important purpose for some areas and not others. The tricky thing is, how do you set up a process to decide when to do it, when not? There's definitely cases where you would see an environmental review of something that really had absolutely nothing to do with the environment. It was just a cog in the process, but you have to have a process for deciding the process. I don't know enough about the legislation that was put in place on each of these to say, “Was there a better way of deciding when to do them, when not to do them?” That is not something that I was involved in in a direct way. "Let's think about redoing how we introduce gender in our procurement process" was never put on the table.On gender, there's a fair amount of evidence in different contexts that says the way of dealing with a gender inequity is not to just take the same old program and say, "We're now going to do this for women." You need to understand something more about the local context. If all you do is take programs and say, "Add a gender component," you end up with a lot of false attribution, and you don't end up being effective at the very thing that the person [leading the program] cares to do.In that Vox interview, your host says, "USAID relies heavily on a small number of well-connected contractors to deliver most aid, while other groups are often deterred from even applying by the process's complexity." He goes on to say that the use of rigorous evaluation methods like randomized controlled trials is the exception, not the norm.On Statecraft, we talked to Kyle Newkirk, who ran USAID procurement in Afghanistan in the late 2000s, about the small set of well-connected contractors that took most of the contracts in Afghanistan. Often, there was very little oversight from USAID, either because it was hard to get out to those locations in a war-torn environment, or because the system of accountability wasn't built there. Did you talk to people about lessons learned from USAID operating in Afghanistan?No. I mean, only to the following extent: The lesson learned there, as I understand it, wasn't so much about the choice on what intervention to fund, it was procurement: the local politics and engagement with the governments or lack thereof. And dealing with the challenge of doing work in a context like that, where there's more risk of fraud and issues of that nature.Our emphasis was about the design of programs to say, “What are you actually going to try to fund?” Dealing with whether there's fraud in the execution would fall more under the Inspector General and other units. That's not an area that we engaged in when we would do evaluation.This actually gets to a key difference between impact evaluations and accountability. It's one of the areas where we see a lot of loosey-goosey language in the media reporting and Twitter. My office focused on impact evaluation. What changed in the world because of this intervention, that wouldn't otherwise have changed? By “change in the world,” we are making a causal statement. That's setting up things like randomized controlled trials to find out, “What was the impact of this program?” It does provide some accountability, but it really should be done to look forward, in order to know, “Does this help achieve the goals we have in mind?” If so, let's learn that, and replicate it, scale it, do it again.If you're going to deliver books to schools, medicine to health clinics, or cash to people, and you're concerned about fraud, then you need to audit that process and see, “Did the books get to the schools, the medicine to the people, the cash to the people?” You don't need to ask, "Did the medicine solve the disease?" There's been studies already. There's a reason that medicine was being prescribed. Once it's proven to be an effective drug, you don't run randomized trials for decades to learn what you already know. If it's the prescribed drug, you just prescribe the drug, and do accountability exercises to make sure that the drugs are getting into the right hands and there isn't theft or corruption along the way.I think it's a very intuitive thing. There's a confusion that often takes place in social science, in economic or education interventions. They somehow forget that once we know that a certain program generates a certain positive impact, we no longer need to track continuously to find out what happens. Instead, we just need to do accountability to make sure that the program is being delivered as it was designed, tested, and shown to work.There are all these criticisms — from the waste, fraud, and corruption perspective — of USAID working with a couple of big contractors. USAID works largely through these big development organizations like Chemonics. Would USAID dollars be more effective if it worked through a larger base of contractors?I don't think we know. There's probably a few different operating models that can deliver the same basic intervention. We need to focus on, ”What actually are we doing on the ground? What is it that we want the recipients of the program to receive, hear, or do?” and then think backwards from there: "Who's the right implementer for this?" If there's an implementer who is much more expensive for delivering the same product, let's find someone who's more cost-effective.It's helpful to break cost-effective programming into two things: the intervention itself and what benefits it accrues, and the cost for delivering that. Sometimes the improvement is not about the intervention, it's about the delivery model. Maybe that's what you're saying: “These players were too few, too large, and they had a grab on the market, so that they were able to charge too much money to deliver something that others were equally able to do at lower cost." If that's the case, that says, "We should reform our procurement process,” because the reason you would see that happen is they were really good at complying with requirements that came at USAID from Congress. You had an overworked workforce [within USAID] that had to comply with all these requirements. If you had a bid between two groups, one of which repeatedly delivered on the paperwork to get a good performance evaluation, and a new group that doesn't have that track record, who are you going to choose? That's how we ended up where we are.My understanding of the history is that it comes from a push from Republicans in the ‘80s, from [Senator] Jesse Helms, to outsource USAID efforts to contractors. So this is not a left-leaning thing. I wouldn't say it is right-leaning either. It was just a decision made decades ago. You combine that with the bureaucratic requirements of working with USAID, and you end up with a few firms and nonprofits skilled at dealing with it.It's definitely my impression that at various points in American history, different partisans are calling for insourcing or for outsourcing. But definitely, I think you're right that the NGO cluster around USAID does spring up out of a Republican push in the eighties.We talked to John Kamensky recently, who was on Al Gore's predecessor to DOGE in the ‘90s.I listened to this, yeah.I'm glad to hear it! I'm thinking of it because they also pushed to cut the workforce in the mid-90s and outsource federal functions.Earlier, you mentioned a slide that showed what we've learned in the field of development economics over the past 20 years. Will you narrate that slide for me?Let me do two slides for you. The slide that I was picturing was a count of randomized controlled trials in development that shows a fairly exponential growth. The movement started in the mid-to-late 1990s, but really took off in the 2000s. Even just in the past 10 years, it's seen a considerable increase. There's about 4-5,000 randomized controlled trials evaluating various programs of the kind USAID funds.That doesn't tell you the substance of what was learned. Here's an example of substance, which is cash transfers: probably the most studied intervention out there. We have a meta-analysis that counted 115 studies. That's where you start having a preponderance of evidence to be able to say something concrete. There's some variation: you get different results in different places; targeting and ways of doing it vary. A good systematic analysis can help tease out what we can say, not just about the effect of cash, but also how to do it and what to expect, depending on how it's done. Fifteen years ago, when we saw the first few come out, you just had, "Oh, that's interesting. But it's a couple of studies, how do you form policy around that?” With 115, we can say so much more.What else have we learned about development that USAID operators in the year 2000 would not have been able to act upon?Think about the development process in two steps. One is choosing good interventions; the other is implementing them well. The study of implementation is historically underdone. The challenge that we face — this is an area I was hoping USAID could make inroads on — was, studying a new intervention might be of high reward from an academic perspective. But it's a lot less interesting to an academic to do much more granular work to say, "That was an interesting program that created these groups [of aid recipients]; now let's do some further knock-on research to find out whether those groups should be made of four, six, or ten people.” It's going to have a lower reward for the researcher, but it's incredibly important.It's equivalent to the color of the envelope in direct marketing. You might run tests — if this were old-style direct marketing — as to whether the envelope should be blue or red. You might find that blue works better. Great, but that's not interesting to an academic. But if you run 50 of these, on a myriad of topics about how to implement better, you end up with a collection of knowledge that is moving the needle on how to achieve more impact per dollar.That collection is not just important for policy: it also helps us learn more about the development process and the bottlenecks for implementing good programs. As we're seeing more digital platforms and data being used, [refining implementation] is more possible compared to 20 years ago, where most of the research was at the intervention level: does this intervention work? That's an exciting transition. It's also a path to seeing how foreign aid can help in individual contexts, [as we] work with local governments to integrate evidence into their operations and be more efficient with their own resources.There's an argument I've seen a lot recently: we under-invest in governance relative to other foreign aid goals. If we care about economic growth and humanitarian outcomes, we should spend a lot more on supporting local governance. What do you make of that claim?I agree with it actually, but there's a big difference between recognizing the problem and seeing what the tool is to address it. It's one thing to say, “Politics matters, institutions matter.” There's lots of evidence to support that, including the recent Nobel Prize. It's another beast to say, “This particular intervention will improve institutions and governance.”The challenge is, “What do we do about this? What is working to improve this? What is resilient to the political process?” The minute you get into those kinds of questions, it's the other end of the spectrum from a cash transfer. A cash transfer has a kind of universality: Not to say you're going to get the same impact everywhere, but it's a bit easier to think about the design of a program. You have fewer parameters to decide. When you think about efforts to improve governance, you need bespoke thinking in every single place.As you point out, it's something of a meme to say “institutions matter” and to leave it at that, but the devil is in all of those details.In my younger years — I feel old saying that — I used to do a lot of work on financial inclusion, and financial literacy was always my go-to example. On a household level, it's really easy to show a correlation: people who are more financially literate make better financial decisions and have more wealth, etc. It's much harder to say, “How do you move the needle on financial literacy in a way that actually helps people make better decisions, absorb shocks better, build investment better, save better?” It's easy to show that the correlation is there. It's much harder to say this program, here, will actually move the needle. That same exact problem is much more complicated when thinking about governance and institutions.Let's talk about USAID as it stands today. You left USAID when it became clear to you that a lot of the work you were doing was not of interest to the people now running it. How did the agency end up so disconnected from a political base of support? There's still plenty of people who support USAID and would like it to be reinstated, but it was at least vulnerable enough to be tipped over by DOGE in a matter of weeks. How did that happen?I don't know that I would agree with the premise. I'm not sure that public support of foreign aid actually changed, I'd be curious to see that. I think aid has always been misunderstood. There are public opinion polls that show people thought 25% of the US budget was spent on foreign aid. One said, "What, do you think it should be?" People said 10%. The right answer is about 0.6%. You could say fine, people are bad at statistics, but those numbers are pretty dauntingly off. I don't know that that's changed. I heard numbers like that years ago.I think there was a vulnerability to an effort that doesn't create a visible impact to people's lives in America, the way that Social Security, Medicare, and roads do. Foreign aid just doesn't have that luxury. I think it's always been vulnerable. It has always had some bipartisan support, because of the understanding of the bigger picture and the soft power that's gained from it. And the recognition that we are a nation built on the idea of generosity and being good to others. That was always there, but it required Congress to step in and say, "Let's go spend this money on foreign aid." I don't think that changed. What changed was that you ended up with an administration that just did not share those values.There's this issue in foreign aid: Congress picks its priorities, but those priorities are not a ranked list of what Congress cares about. It's the combination of different interests and pressures in Congress that generates the list of things USAID is going to fund.You could say doing it that way is necessary to build buy-in from a bunch of different political interests for the work of foreign aid. On the other hand, maybe the emergent list from that process is not the things that are most important to fund. And clearly, that congressional buy-in wasn't enough to protect USAID from DOGE or from other political pressures.How should people who care about foreign aid reason about building a version of USAID that's more effective and less vulnerable at the same time?Fair question. Look, I have thoughts, but by no means do I think of myself as the most knowledgeable person to say, here's the answer in the way forward. One reality is, even if Congress did object, they didn't have a mechanism in place to actually object. They can control the power of the purse the next round, but we're probably going to be facing a constitutional crisis over the Impoundment Act, to see if the executive branch can impound money that Congress spent. We'll see how this plays out. Aside from taking that to court, all Congress could do was complain.I would like what comes back to have two things done that will help, but they don't make foreign aid immune. One is to be more evidence-based, because then attacks on being ineffective are less strong. But the reality is, some of the attacks on its “effectiveness,” and the examples used, had nothing to do with poorly-chosen interventions. There was a slipperiness of language, calling something that they don't like “fraud” and “waste” because they didn't like its purpose. That is very different than saying, “We actually agreed on the purpose of something, but then you implemented it in such a bad way that there was fraud and waste.” There were really no examples given of that second part. So I don't know that being more evidence-based will actually protect it, given that that wasn't the way it was really genuinely taken down.The second is some boundaries. There is a core set of activities that have bipartisan support. How do we structure a foreign aid that is just focused on that? We need to find a way to put the things that are more controversial — whether it's the left or right that wants it — in a separate bucket. Let the team that wins the election turn that off and on as they wish, without adulterating the core part that has bipartisan support. That's the key question: can we set up a process that partitions those, so that they don't have that vulnerability? [I wrote about this problem earlier this year.]My counter-example is PEPFAR, which had a broad base of bipartisan support. PEPFAR consistently got long-term reauthorizations from Congress, I think precisely because of the dynamic you're talking about: It was a focused, specific intervention that folks all over the political spectrum could get behind and save lives. But in government programs, if something has a big base of support, you have an incentive to stuff your pet partisan issues in there, for the same reason that “must-pass” bills get stuffed with everybody's little thing. [In 2024, before DOGE, PEPFAR's original Republican co-sponsor came out against a long-term reauthorization, on the grounds that the Biden administration was using the program to promote abortion. Congress reauthorized PEPFAR for only one year, and that reauthorization lapsed in 2025.]You want to carve out the things that are truly bipartisan. But does that idea have a timer attached? What if, on a long enough timeline, everything becomes politicized?There are economic theorems about the nature of a repeated game. You can get many different equilibria in the long run. I'd like to think there's a world in which that is the answer. But we have seen an erosion of other things, like the filibuster regarding judges. Each team makes a little move in some direction, and then you change the equilibrium. We always have that risk. The goal is, how can you establish something where that doesn't happen?It might be that what's happened is helpful, in an unintended way, to build equilibrium in the future that keeps things focused on the bipartisan aspect. Whether it's the left or the right that wants to do something that they know the other side will object to, they hold back and say, "Maybe we shouldn't do that. Because when we do, the whole thing gets blown up."Let's imagine you're back at USAID a couple of years from now, with a broader latitude to organize our foreign aid apparatus around impact and effectiveness. What other things might we want to do — beyond measuring programs and keeping trade-offs in mind — if we really wanted to focus on effectiveness? Would we do fewer interventions and do them at larger scale?I think we would do fewer things simpler and bigger, but I also think we need to recognize that even at our biggest, we were tiny compared to the budget of the local government. If we can do more to use our money to help them be more effective with their money, that's the biggest win to go for. That starts looking a lot like things Mark Green was putting in place [as administrator of USAID] under Trump I, under the Journey to Self-Reliance [a reorganization of USAID to help countries address development challenges themselves].Sometimes that's done in the context of, "Let's do that for five or ten years, and then we can stop giving aid to that country." That was the way the Millennium Challenge Corporation talked about their country selection initially. Eventually, they stopped doing that, because they realized that that was never happening. I think that's okay. As much as we might help make some changes, even if we succeed in helping the poorest country in the world use their resources better, they're still going to be poor. We're still going to be rich. There's still maybe going to be the poorest, because if we do that in the 10 poorest countries and they all move up, maybe the 11th becomes the poorest, and then we can work there. I don't think getting off of aid is necessarily the objective.But if that was clearly the right answer, that's a huge win if we've done that by helping to prove the institutions and governance of that country so that it is rolling out better policies, helping its people better, and collecting their own tax revenue. If we can have an eye on that, then that's a huge win for foreign aid in general.How are we supposed to be measuring the impact of soft power? I think that's a term that's not now much in vogue in DC.There's no one answer to how to measure soft power. It's described as the influence that we gain in the world in terms of geopolitics, everything from treaties and the United Nations to access to markets; trade policy, labor policy. The basic idea of soft power manifests itself in all those different ways.It's a more extreme version of the challenge of measuring the impact of cash transfers. You want to measure the impact of a pill that is intended to deal with disease: you measure the disease, and you have a direct measure. You want to measure the impact of cash: you have to measure a lot of different things, because you don't know how people are going to use the cash. Soft power is even further down the spectrum: you don't know exactly how aid is helping build our partnership with a country's people and leaders. How is that going to manifest itself in the future? That becomes that much harder to do.Having said that, there's academic studies that document everything from attitudes about America to votes at the United Nations that follow aid, and things of that nature. But it's not like there's one core set: that's part of what makes it a challenge.I will put my cards on the table here: I have been skeptical of the idea that USAID is a really valuable tool for American soft power, for maintaining American hegemony, etc. It seems much easier to defend USAID by simply saying that it does excellent humanitarian work, and that's valuable. The national security argument for USAID seems harder to substantiate.I think we agree on this. You have such a wide set of things to look at, it's not hard to imagine a bias from a researcher might lead to selection of outcomes, and of the context. It's not a well-defined enough concept to be able to say, "It worked 20% of the time, and it did not in these, and the net average…" Average over what? Even though there's good case studies that show various paths where it has mattered, there's case studies that show it doesn't.I also get nervous about an entire system that's built around [attempts to measure soft power]. It turns foreign aid into too much of a transactional process, instead of a relationship that is built on the Golden Rule, “There's people in this country that we can actually help.” Sure, there's this hope that it'll help further our national interests. But if they're suffering from drought and famine, and we can provide support and save some lives, or we can do longer term developments and save tomorrow's lives, we ought to do that. That is a good thing for our country to do.Yet the conversation does often come back to this question of soft power. The problem with transactional is you get exactly what you contract on: nothing more, nothing less. There's too many unknowns here, when we're dealing with country-level interactions, and engagements between countries. It needs to be about relationships, and that means supporting even if there isn't a contract that itemizes the exact quid pro quo we are getting for something.I want to talk about what you observed in the administration change and the DOGE-ing of USAID. I think plenty of observers looked at this in the beginning and thought, “It's high time that a lot of these institutions were cleaned up and that someone took a hard look at how we spend money there.”There was not really any looking at any of the impact of anything. That was never in the cards. There was a 90-day review that was supposed to be done, but there were no questions asked, there was no data being collected. There was nothing whatsoever being looked at that had anything to do with, “Was this award actually accomplishing what it set out to accomplish?” There was no process in which they made those kinds of evaluations on what's actually working.You can see this very clearly when you think about what their bean counter was at DOGE: the spending that they cut. It's like me saying, "I'm going to do something beneficial for my household by stopping all expenditures on food." But we were getting something for that. Maybe we could have bought more cheaply, switched grocery stores, made a change there that got us the same food for less money. That would be a positive change. But you can't cut all your food expenditures, call that a saving, and then not have anything to eat. That's just bad math, bad economics.But that's exactly what they were doing. Throughout the entire government, that bean counter never once said, “benefits foregone.” It was always just “lowered spending.” Some of that probably did actually have a net loss, maybe it was $100 million spent on something that only created $10 million of benefits to Americans. That's a $90 million gain. But it was recorded as $100 million. And the point is, they never once looked at what benefits were being generated from the spending. What was being asked, within USAID, had nothing to do with what was actually being accomplished by any of the money that was being spent. It was never even asked.How do you think about risky bets in a place like USAID? It would be nice for USAID to take lots of high-risk, high-reward bets, and to be willing to spend money that will be “wasted” in the pursuit of high-impact interventions. But that approach is hard for government programs, politically, because the misses are much more salient than the successes.This is a very real issue. I saw this the very first time I did any sort of briefing with Congress when I was Chief Economist. The question came at me, "Why doesn't USAID show us more failures?" I remember thinking to myself, "Are you willing to promise that when they show the failure, you won't punish them for the failure — that you'll reward them for documenting and learning from the failure and not doing it again?" That's a very difficult nut to crack.There's an important distinction to make. You can have a portfolio of evidence generation, some things work and some don't, that can collectively contribute towards knowledge and scaling of effective programs. USAID actually had something like this called Development Innovation Ventures (DIV), and was in an earmark from Congress. It was so good that they raised money from the effective altruist community to further augment their pot of money. This was strong because a lot of it was not evaluating USAID interventions. It was just funding a portfolio of evidence generation about what works, implemented by other parties. The failures aren't as devastating, because you're showing a failure of some other party: it wasn't USAID money paying for an intervention. That was a strong model for how USAID can take on some risks and do some evidence generation that is immune to the issue you just described.If you're going to do evaluations of USAID money, the issue is very real. My overly simplistic view is that a lot of what USAID does should not be getting a highly rigorous impact evaluation. USAID should be rolling out, simple and at scale, things that have already been shown elsewhere. Let the innovation take place pre-USAID, funded elsewhere, maybe by DIV. Let smaller and more nimble nonprofits be the innovators and the documenters of what works. Then, USAID can adopt the things that are more effective and be more immune to this issue.So yeah, there is a world that is not first-best where USAID does the things that have strong evidence already. When it comes to actual innovation, where we do need to take risks that things won't work, let that be done in a way that may be supported by USAID, but partitioned away.I'm looking at a chart of USAID program funding in Fiscal Year 2022: the three big buckets are humanitarian, health, and governance, all on the order of $10–12 billion. Way down at the bottom, there's $500 million for “economic growth.” What's in that bucket that USAID funds, and should that piece of the pie chart be larger?I do think that should be larger, but it depends on how you define it. I don't say that just because I'm an economist. It goes back to the comment earlier about things that we can do to help improve local governance, and how they're using their resources. The kinds of things that might be funded would be efforts to work with local government to improve their ability to collect taxes. Or to set up efficient regulations for the banking industry, so it can grow and provide access to credit and savings. These are things that can help move the needle on macroeconomic outcomes. With that, you have more resources. That helps health and education, you have these downstream impacts. As you pointed out, the earmark on that was tiny. It did not have quite the same heartstring tug. But the logical link is huge and strong: if you strengthen the local government's financial stability, the benefits very much accrue to the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Social Protection, etc.Fighting your way out of poverty through growth is unambiguously good. You can look at many countries around the world that have grown economically, and through that, reduced poverty. But it's one thing to say that growth will alleviate poverty. It's another to say, "Here's aid money that will trigger growth." If we knew how to do that, we would've done it long ago, in a snap.Last question. Let's say it's a clean slate at USAID in a couple years, and you have wide latitude to do things your way. I want the Dean Karlan vision for the future of USAID.It needs to have, at the high level, a recognition that the Golden Rule is an important principle that guides our thinking on foreign aid and that we want to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Being generous as a people is something that we pride ourselves in, our nation represents us as people, so we shouldn't be in any way shy to use foreign aid to further that aspiration of being a generous nation.The actual way of delivering aid, I would say, three things. Simpler. Let's focus on the evidence of what works, but recognize the boundaries of that evidence and how to contextualize it. There is a strong need to understand what it means to be simpler, and how to identify what that means in specific countries and contexts.The second is about leveraging local government, and working more to recognize that, as big as we may be, we're still going to be tiny relative to local government. If we can do more to improve how local government is using its resources, we've won.The third is about finding common ground. There's a lot. That's one of the reasons why I've started working on a consortium with Republicans and Democrats. The things I care about are generally non-partisan. The goal is to take the aspirations that foreign aid has — about improving health, education, economic outcomes, food security, agricultural productivity, jobs, trade, whatever the case is — and how do we use the evidence that's out there to move the needle as much as we can towards those goals? A lot of topics have common ground. How do we set up a foreign aid system that stays true to the common ground? I'd like to think it's not that hard. That's what I think would be great to see happen. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

In this groundbreaking AI-simulated interview, legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass comes to life to share his profound insights on his extraordinary journey from slavery to freedom, and how it applies to today's world. We dive deep into modern race relations, the eternal struggle for justice, party politics (including his Republican roots and the great realignment), disagreements with Abraham Lincoln, and controversial parallels between slavery's moral underpinnings and issues like vaccine mandates, abortion, and illegal immigration exploitation.Timestamps:00:00:00 - Introduction & Who is Frederick Douglass?00:07:15 - Progress in Race Relations & The Finish Line for Liberty00:13:30 - The Role of Struggle, Grievance, and Gratitude00:18:56 - Politics: Republicans Then vs. Now00:25:58 - The Importance of Dialogue in Persuasion00:30:04 - Disagreements with Lincoln & His Legacy00:37:00 - Slavery's Echoes in Modern Issues (Vaccine Mandates, Abortion, Immigration)If you're passionate about history, civil rights, and applying timeless lessons to current events, hit like, subscribe, and comment below: What modern issue would YOU ask Frederick Douglass? #FrederickDouglass #Abolitionist #ModernPolitics #AIInterview #CivilRightsSupport the show

➡️ Access the Liberation Masterclass I mention in this episode here ➡️ stephanie-trager.com  Re-Evolutionary Finance, Regenerating Life, Love, and Currency to Solve Our World's Pressing Opportunities 

Get on the waitlist for Functional Health Coaching HERE. In this powerful and practical episode, Tanya tackles one of the most challenging aspects of leadership: navigating team resistance when a necessary decision isn't popular. Designed for high-integrity women leaders, especially in healthcare, this episode offers a faith-rooted framework for setting boundaries, holding the line with grace, and discerning the difference between healthy leadership and autocratic control. With real-world wisdom, scriptural truth, and compassionate challenge, Tanya helps leaders balance empathy with authority—without losing themselves in the process. Whether you're facing ongoing pushback from your team, struggling with decision fatigue, or feeling guilty about making a hard call, this episode will equip and encourage you to stand firm in your role while remaining grounded in purpose and peace. What You'll Learn: The emotional toll of unpopular but necessary decisions Signs a conversation has moved from dialogue to demand Four practical boundary-setting statements every leader should use The difference between being clear vs. being controlling Why being unpopular doesn't mean you're leading poorly How Jesus modeled purpose-driven leadership under pressure Episode Resources: GFL Episode Catalog   5 Ways To Connect With Me: 1️⃣ FREE CALL: Book your FREE Coaching Call now! Get personalized and practical strategies for work-life balance. Start your grace-filled life and leadership journey ➡︎ https://gracefilledleader.com/workwithme   2️⃣ FACEBOOK: Become part of our Supportive Facebook Group. Connect, share, and learn with others navigating life and leadership ➡︎ https://gracefilledleader.com/community   3️⃣ FREE WORKSHOP: Watch my FREE “Conquer Your Email Inbox” workshop! It's your key to jumpstart productivity ➡︎ https://gracefilledleader.com/workshop   4️⃣ COACHING: Are you READY to Lead Well, Live Well and BE Well? Get on the waitlist for functional health coaching. It's the accountability and guidance you need to reclaim your health and happiness! ➡︎ https://gracefilledleader.com/health   5️⃣CONTACT: Leave me a question or comment ➡︎ https://gracefilledleader.com/contact   "Yes! Finally, a podcast helping others become the thriving leaders they're meant to be outside of hustle-culture! This is an amazing resource! Thank you so much for sharing and helping us become Spirit-driven, peaceful leaders!"    If you can relate, please consider rating and reviewing my show! It helps me reach more people – just like you – to help them change their future. Don't forget to follow the show so you don't miss any episodes! And, if you're feeling really generous, I'd be SO honored if you would share this podcast with someone.   Click here to view our privacy policy.   Reminder:  The information you hear on this show is not meant to diagnose, manage or treat disease.  Always consult with your own health practitioner before you make any changes to your health.

The question the book asks is obviously transforming the system is not an individual task, it's a collective activity. But it still begs the question, if we're trying to contribute to that, what do we need to do? Not every four years when we vote, not every year when we go to a strategy workshop, but what do we do every day? And so the title is very straightforward: Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems. And that's the question the book is offering an answer to.My second conversation with writer, facilitator and consultant Adam Kahane (the first was episode e219) and with the audience at the Ottawa launch of Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems, the Catalytic Power of Radical Engagement at Perfect Books on July 2, 2025. This final regular episode of season 6 is part of my roundtable series, open-ended conversations about what a group of citizens are passionate about. And passionate they were! I started by asking Adam why he wrote the book and why does he think it's relevant today, in particular here in the nation's capital at a time when there are great tensions with our neighbours to the south and when Canadians are talking to each other more than ever about our shared values, and the challenges that we face such as the ecological crisis and climate emergency, which sadly seems to have temporarily fallen off our collective radar. Show notes generated by Whisper Transcribe AIAction pointsEmbrace radical engagement: Lean into understanding diverse perspectives and actively seek common ground.Recognize the power of everyday habits: Focus on daily actions to create lasting systemic change.Navigate complexity: Balance working towards a larger goal with acknowledging individual interests and power dynamics.Collaborate across differences: Seek opportunities to work with those who hold different views to achieve meaningful progress.Act responsibly: Consider the broader impact of your actions on all living beings.Story PreviewWhat if the key to changing the world lies not in grand gestures, but in the small, often overlooked habits of our daily lives? Adam Kahane shares his journey from facilitating transformative dialogues in South Africa to uncovering the power of radical engagement, inviting us to rethink how we contribute to a better future. Chapter Summary00:00 The Collective Task of Transformation01:19 Introducing Adam Kahane04:01 Setting the Stage for Discussion09:40 The Motivation Behind the Book15:42 Everyday Habits for Transformation22:39 Exploring the Seven Habits29:12 The Slippery Slope of Disagreement and The Challenge of Acting Responsibly35:20 Power Dynamics in Collaboration39:40 Trust and Collaboration44:00 Balancing Urgency and Everyday Habits54:25 Art, Culture, and Collaboration56:13 Radical Engagement in Action01:00:05 Navigating Power Dynamics and The Importance of Agency01:12:51 Redefining Power and Responsibility01:17:04 Risks and Realities of Engagement01:23:13 The Complexity of Multiple SystemsFeatured QuotesTransforming the system is not an individual task. It's a collective activity.Radical engagement is the opposite of standing back with your arms crossed saying, take it or leave it.Ring the bells you still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. (quoting Leonard Cohen)Behind the StoryAdam Kahane's latest book, ‘Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems,' stems from a moment of confusion during an interview with South African leader Trevor Manuel. This experience led Kahane to explore what it means to contribute to systemic change, focusing on the everyday actions that shape our world. This episode explores themes of power, collaboration, and social responsibility and how the arts weave their way through all of this. Credit: cover photo by Conyer Clayton *END NOTES FOR ALL EPISODESHey conscient listeners, I've been producing the conscient podcast as a learning and unlearning journey since May 2020 on un-ceded Anishinaabe Algonquin territory (Ottawa). It's my way to give back.In parallel with the production of the conscient podcast and its francophone counterpart, balado conscient, I I publish free ‘a calm presence' Substack see https://acalmpresence.substack.com.Your feedback is always welcome at claude@conscient.ca and/or on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Threads, BlueSky, Mastodon, Tik Tok, YouTube and Substack.Share what you like, etcI am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this podcast, including the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation systems and infrastructure that made this production possible. Claude SchryerLatest update on July 8, 2025

For more, visit www.BishalSarkar.com or WhatsApp our team: https://wa.me/918880361526In this insightful episode of the "I Love Public Speaking" podcast, Bishal Sarkar shares effective strategies for handling disagreements without escalating into arguments.Join Bishal Sarkar as he explores the importance of maintaining calm and respectful communication, even when perspectives clash.Learn practical techniques to navigate conflicts, find common ground, and foster constructive dialogue that leads to positive outcomes.Tune in to the "I Love Public Speaking" podcast with Bishal Sarkar to discover how to manage disagreements gracefully and strengthen your relationships.

This week on the Retirement Quick Tips Podcast, my husband Troy and I are discussing the Top 5 Money Issues That Can Break a Marriage.  Today, we're talking about priority differences between spouses. This is often about money personalities - who's a saver, and who's a spender, because savers and spenders will naturally have different priorities, but it;s also about other priority differences that go beyond saving vs. spending.

Isaac Saul is a politics reporter and the founder of Tangle, an independent, nonpartisan news outlet. In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and Isaac Saul discuss the importance of exploring both sides of an argument, whether Donald Trump's executive overreach amounts to authoritarianism, and how to handle immigration. Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay. Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | Google X: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasion YouTube: Yascha Mounk, Persuasion LinkedIn: Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Loretta Ross was once known for her fiery temper, shaped by more than 50 years on the front lines battling racism, sexism and sexual violence. At 71, she says she has come to understand there’s a more effective way to face disagreements. Judy Woodruff spoke with Ross about her method of turning tough conversations into productive ones. It’s part of her series, America at a Crossroads. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

Categorizing LGBTQ+ people as a single community, rather than a broad coalition of diverse groups, is paralyzing the advancement of services, spaces, and political outcomes most of us want.Recognizing our coalition-ness would allow for a greater diversity of thought and, more importantly, more resources for the goals we all agree on.This gay man would rather defeat MAGA authoritarianism and celebrate gay male culture than land a painful blow to any of the other letters in the rainbow alphabet coalition, but the TQ+ letters of our coalition are making that difficult.So, I'm writing this essay.Little, if anything, is being done within the LGBTQ+ Community to further the development of gay culture. Bringing that up is one of the many things that's unpopular within the current rainbow alphabet zeitgeist..Differences of thought are simply not allowed. The rainbow alphabet is “all in” on the needs of TQ+. The rest of you need to not only chip in and help, but you also need to accept LGB invisibility. We're all Queer now. End of story.Only a heretic would share any comment on “gender affirming care” or "puberty blockers” outside of the approved ideological orthodoxy, which is “I agree with anything and everything the TQ+ activists say.”As an LGBTQ+ “Community,” currently dominated by the TQ+s, we are forming circular firing squads, performing purity tests, and then eliminating people, their talent, and their resources rather than building things.We Need To TalkAfter my last Substack post, "On Edge" (a poem about my political angst), a friend who has always been real with me texted to see if I was okay. I told him about sitting on an essay instead of publishing it because I didn't want to add more heft to our frighteningly polarized, burn-it-all-down community conversation. But I had to say something, so I wrote the poem.He replied, “I am frustrated with the politics of our community as well. Not sure what the answers are, and it is hard to discuss.”It really is hard to discuss.My friend and I saw each other at two parties soon after that. We didn't discuss it. The gays I tried to bring it up with quickly changed the subject or excused themselves from my presence.The meta‑message: Only one sanctioned script is safe. Say it wrong, and you're out!Having any opinion other than “Anything the TQ+s want is what I want” is queer heresy.We Can ShareThere are enough resources for each letter of the rainbow alphabet coalition to focus on the needs of its own group and then bring those needs to the community conversation.A coalition allows each group (L, G, B, T, Q+, etc.) to:* Identify its own authentic specific needs without apology.* Build its own cultural confidence, spaces, and support structures.* Bring clarified priorities to a central table, like delegations to the UN, where we can collaborate on overlapping agendas.That's the work our modern LGBT Centers (and allied institutions) need to lean into: conveners, translators, mediators. NOT enforcers of a single orthodoxy.Let's work together on the things we agree on and let people have diverse opinions.All of us working together on the goals we honestly believe in will result in things being created rather than watching things fall apart as we entertain endless “ouch” sessions that go nowhere.Disagreement ≠ disloyalty.Debate ≠ bigotry.Silence out of fear ≠ solidarity.Need permission?Hey gay!Yeah, I'm talking to you; you have a difficult time asking for anything gay.I understand.During the short time I ran for a seat on the West Hollywood City Council, I quickly learned (in a city that is 40% gay men) that gays don't give themselves permission to talk about or prioritize gay stuff.Don't worry, we can do gay stuff while simultaneously working on broader, alphabet coalition stuff as well.Consider this your permission slip!You have permission to use your agency to advocate for your gay self.Let's Do It!Let's celebrate the freedoms our hard-won civil rights victories afford us.* Let's build physical spaces for gay men to drop into and discuss the realities of being homos.* Let's work towards opening European-style bathhouses.* Let's host annual gay men's conferences to develop strategies on everything from coming out to dying with dignity.* Let's change the laws that make that possible.Currently, we are not working towards ANY of those goals.Just Gays and LGBs are TalkingSome gay, lesbian, and bisexual people (same-sex attracted people) are already talking about it.If you look beyond polite silence, there's a growing set of LGB‑forward or gay‑led platforms wrestling with these tensions: The Queer Majority (Substack), HumanGayMale, Just Gay Germany, and the various LGB Alliance orgs (UK, USA, Australia, Germany, Norway, Ireland).Unfortunately, a lot of their conversations focus on TQ+ issues they believe are at odds with LGB issues. I want more strategy sessions on building LGB infrastructure that celebrates and preserves LGB cultures.Many in these groups are quite angry–like I was when I wrote the piece I didn't post.I'm doing my best to keep most of my attention on creating things for gays and less on calling out the negative impacts of TQ ideologies on LGB people. But I am writing this essay, so I obviously think there are things wrong with our current political and operational configuration.I listened to Andrew Sullivan on The Queer Majority podcast with Ben Appe and found it enlightening. It dives deep into the problems of TQ ideology. Here's a taste: “We have little in common. LGBs love their own sex while TQs are in conflict with their own sex.”I'll let Sullivan parse out those issues while I keep my focus on gay stuff.His interview is particularly compelling because Sullivan is speaking publicly with another gay man on these heretical issues.So far, the only gay on gay conversations I've had on these issues have been well hidden from public view. One was with a massage client in my studio after his massage. He works at the LGBT Center in Los Angeles and can not speak his mind at work about the dearth of gay offerings. Others have occurred with acquaintances in one-on-one conversations in the sauna at the gym or with fuck buddies in the sanctum of a bedroom.So far, here in Los Angeles, every gay-gay conversation I have had on these issues has been in the shadows.These conversations shouldn't feel rare in 2025, but they are. Let's change that.Most But Not AllI have always supported non-discrimination in public accommodations for TQ+ people as outlined in Title II Of The Civil Rights Act.Let's get LGBTQ+ folks included in that law!I support TQ+ people on most of their issues, but our issues are sufficiently dissimilar to require different lobbying groups.Things I will fight for alongside every letter of the rainbow alphabet:* Non‑discrimination / civil rights inclusions.* Protection from violence and harassment.* Mental health support and suicide prevention.* Youth safety and anti‑bullying measures.* Accessible evidence‑informed healthcare free from political distortion.Let's Talk: Invest In Gay CultureWe can keep policing language and reciting scripts, or we can mature into a coalition that trusts its authentically expressed parts to flourish and then collaborate.Differentiation plus solidarity is a strength formula, not a weakness.Let's evolve from performative unanimity to productive pluralism (a fundamental liberal idea), and start building the things we still need.Let's talk about gay stuff.I'll host.Small groups, Zoom salons, in-person meetups, something.If you're game, feel free to drop a comment, forward this to a friend, or reply privately. Let's sketch out what a functioning coalition looks like in practice.Because if we don't build it, we'll just keep fighting over words like, community, while the spaces we've already built continue to fade into nothingness. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mikegerle.substack.com/subscribe

Care to Change continues its conversation on freedom by exploring one of the most empowering forms of liberation: using your voice. In this episode, April welcomes back therapist and clinical director Brittany Gipson to unpack the courage, clarity, and healing that come from speaking your truth.They dive into what it means to “find your voice,” why we lose it, and how reclaiming it is central to living an authentic, purpose-filled life. Whether you're just beginning a journey of self-discovery or working through the fear of being truly seen, this episode offers gentle wisdom and practical steps for stepping into emotional and spiritual freedom.

Join hosts Mike Erre and Tim Stafford as they delve into a thought-provoking discussion on the nuances of biblical interpretation, the role of community in faith, and the challenges of modern Christianity. From exploring the portrayal of masculinity in popular culture to addressing the complexities of communal discernment, this episode offers a rich tapestry of insights and reflections. And Superman :) From judgmental posturing and a lack of authentic community to political alignment and cultural challenges, the hosts unpack how these factors are reshaping the role of the church in society. They also discuss the importance of cruciformity, humility, and collaborative leadership as ways to better reflect the teachings of Jesus. This conversation dives into how faith intersects with politics, navigating cultural issues like immigration and justice, and how the church can reclaim its role as a place of hospitality and authentic engagement. With personal anecdotes, biblical insights, and practical takeaways, this episode invites listeners to think critically about their own faith journey and the church's impact on the world. Join the discussion and share your thoughts—feel free to email questions or engage with the conversation on Facebook and Instagram. We encourage and would love to hear your perspective as we pursue a deeper understanding of faith, justice, and community together. Let's keep the dialogue alive! CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 02:38 - Cleaning Up YouTube Page 04:18 - Thank You Message 05:19 - 5 Ways Christians Resist Evil 11:05 - Reasons Young People Leave Churches 18:18 - Intro to Biblical Series 2 21:00 - Objective Text Analysis 22:10 - Disagreeing Well in Conversations 25:30 - 1 Timothy 2 Disagreements 37:30 - Sexuality in Biblical Text 46:51 - Layperson's Interpretation 48:08 - Good vs Bad Biblical Interpretations 49:15 - Voice of Christ Explained 49:56 - Understanding Fruit of the Spirit 50:07 - Goals of Bible Reading 51:43 - Understanding the Bible's Complexity 52:29 - Starting with Bible Study 55:33 - John MacArthur's Legacy 57:05 - Approaching the Bible 1:00:57 - Support the Podcast As always, we encourage and would love discussion as we pursue. Feel free to email in questions to hello@voxpodcast.com, and to engage the conversation on Facebook and Instagram. We're on YouTube (if you're into that kinda thing): VOXOLOGY TV. Our Merch Store! ETSY Learn more about the Voxology Podcast Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify Support the Voxology Podcast on Patreon The Voxology Spotify channel can be found here: Voxology Radio Follow us on Instagram: @voxologypodcast and "like" us on Facebook Follow Mike on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mikeerre Music in this episode by Timothy John Stafford Instagram & Twitter: @GoneTimothy

Last time we spoke about a major Chinese counter offensive at Shanghai. "Black Saturday," saw over a thousand civilians killed. In response, Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek launched Operation Iron Fist on August 17, aiming to exploit weaknesses in Japanese defenses but failing due to disarray and entrenched opposition. Amid mounting pressure, Chinese commanders redirected their strategy toward Yangshupu, seeking to breach Japanese lines along the Huangpu River. The 36th Infantry Division, newly trained by German advisers, launched a surprise assault on August 19, but inexperienced troops faced relentless Japanese fire, struggling to hold their positions. As casualties mounted, the Japanese executed strategic landings at Chuanshakou and Wusong, capturing key points with minimal resistance. The battle at Baoshan became emblematic of their resistance, where a handful of defenders vowed to fight to the last man, encapsulating the desperation and bravery of those battling under the shadow of impending defeat.    #159 The Battle of Shanghai Part 4: The Battle for Luodian Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. In the early days of September, a profound sense of resignation descended upon the senior Chinese commanders as the Japanese troops captured stronghold after stronghold along the riverbank, first Shizilin, then Wusong, and finally Baoshan. Despite the resignation among their leaders, the rank and file remained resolute in their determination to defend every inch of Chinese soil. The fighting along Wusong Creek, extending west from Wusong, became particularly brutal. “There were huge numbers of deaths on both sides, and the water of the creek turned red,” wrote Chinese official Wang Jieshi in his diary. “The saying about ‘rivers of blood' became a grim reality.” Meanwhile the Japanese were landing more reinforcements, such as the Tida detachment on September 6. The next day Tokyo HQ authorized the dispatch of the 9th, 13th and 101st divisions and the Shigeto Detachment to Shanghai. That same day over 10 Japanese infantry battalions were ordered to advance from Northeast China to Shanghai. The situation was dire for the Chinese. Not only were their frontline units struggling in battle, but they were also sustaining exceptionally high casualties. By early September, Yao Ziqing's 98th Infantry Division had suffered 4,960 casualties, including a regimental commander killed and another wounded. Throughout the battle for Shanghai, various units within the division received reinforcements up to four times. Upon arrival, these reinforcements were quickly armed and sent directly to the front lines. As recalled by Fang Jing “Some were injured almost immediately after arriving. When they reached the hospital, they had no idea which unit they belonged to.” The string of defeats and setbacks significantly affected morale within the Chinese Army, particularly among senior officers. While the lower ranks generally showed a willingness to continue the fight, high-ranking officials exhibited waning resolve. “All my soldiers have been sacrificed. There's nobody left,” Xia Chuzhong, commander of the 79th Division, lamented in a phone call to Luo Zhuoying, head of the 18th Army, part of the 15th Army Group. In response, Luo Zhuoying urged, “Aren't you still standing? Hold your ground and fight.” Having lost Baoshan the next defensive position was the small town of Luodian, the transportation center connecting Baoshan, downtown Shanghai, Jiading, Songjiang and several other towns via highways. The successful defense of Luodian was crucial for the security of Suzhou and Shanghai. On August 29, German adviser Alexander von Falkenhausen warned Chiang Kai-shek that the town needed to be held at all costs, describing it as "the most crucial strategic point.”. Chiang Kai-shek was determined to hold on to Luodian. He personally summoned senior commanders to the 3rd War Zone headquarters in Suzhou, emphasizing that the town must be retaken at all costs. In response, the commanders deployed entire divisions to the battle for Luodian. During one of several Chinese assaults, Qiu Weida, a regimental commander in the 51st Infantry Division, led a night attack on the southern part of Luodian. Moving quietly through the darkness, the Chinese force, about two companies strong, approached a Japanese camp, most of whose soldiers were asleep. The Chinese launched a swift attack, giving the Japanese no chance to react. They shot and bayoneted soldiers while they were still lying down, successfully taking over the camp and preparing for a counterattack. When the Japanese responded, the Chinese staged a fighting retreat, deliberately luring the enemy into an open area where well-armed soldiers lay in ambush. As the Japanese advanced, Qiu Weida signaled with a flare, a pre-arranged signal to open fire. Infantry weapons of various calibers joined in the assault. As dawn broke, Qiu raised his binoculars to survey the scene, which was a disturbing sight, covered with a tangled mass of dead and dying bodies. The Japanese commanders launched what they hoped would be the decisive blow to break out from the Baoshan perimeter. Elements of the 3rd Division were tasked with moving down the road toward Liuhang and occupying Yanghang. Meanwhile, the 11th Division's Amaya Detachment, which had arrived in Wusong on September 2, was to seize Yuepu, a village on the other strategic road leading west from Baoshan that blocked access to Luodian and the opportunity to link up with other units of the 11th Division fighting in the area. This operation aimed to create the necessary space for a full assault on Shanghai, and the Japanese dedicated every available resource to the effort. The artillery barrage began before dawn on September 1, with Japanese guns of all calibers participating. For more than two weeks, the Japanese had been able to disembark supplies at landing sites along the Yangtze and Huangpu Rivers. After daybreak, air raids intensified unusually, with the Japanese seemingly deploying all available aircraft in this narrow part of the front. Eventually, the Japanese infantry prepared to launch their attack. While this was simply the latest in a series of Japanese assaults, the sheer tenacity displayed indicated to the Chinese that this time was different. However, after an entire day of fighting, little territorial gain was made. The defenders fought with a determination bordering on fanaticism, despite a total lack of air and artillery support, effectively utilizing the obstacles created by canals that cut through the heavily cultivated area. By sunset, the Japanese had advanced no further than the eastern edge of Yuepu, although the village had been completely destroyed by artillery fire. Yanghang remained firmly in Chinese hands. In the countryside between the two western roads leading from Baoshan, Japanese units had only managed to occupy territory where their artillery and aircraft had utterly obliterated the defenders. To an outsider, it might seem that the Chinese could breathe a sigh of relief. However, from the perspective of Chinese commanders, the situation was vastly different. Their primary concern was the Japanese superiority in artillery. The contested area north of Shanghai consisted mainly of low-lying rice and cotton fields with relatively few trees, offering insufficient camouflage for all but the smallest units. This allowed Japanese naval gunners on the elevated waters of the Yangtze and Huangpu to sometimes directly observe Chinese troops. Even when there was no direct line of sight from the ships in the rivers, they were aided by the directions of observers patrolling in aircraft or hovering in balloons over the horizon. The Chinese had long realized that exposing their units to continuous attack from naval guns played directly into the Japanese hands. They understood that they needed to move away from the riverbank and the lethal fire of the IJN Although the decision to withdraw would have been made sooner or later, it was hastened by the relentless Japanese pressure on the two roads from Baoshan, as their loss would create a breach between Zhang Zhizhong's 9th Army Group in the Shanghai area and Chen Cheng's 15th Army Group to the left. General Gu Zhutong, a member of Chiang Kai-shek's inner circle who had recently been appointed deputy commander of the 3rd War Zone, witnessed how some of the best divisions were being decimated in the defense of Yuepu and Yanghang. Meanwhile, Zhang Zhizhong was pushing for the withdrawal of troops in Yangshupu, which risked becoming a dangerously exposed salient if a breach occurred. The order for the two Chinese army groups to withdraw came late on September 11. Under the cover of darkness, the bulk of the divisions pulled back to positions reinforced by reserves in the preceding days. As thousands of soldiers moved several miles to the rear, the Japanese remained unaware that anything unusual was occurring, and the entire movement took place without enemy harassment. Only skeleton crews remained in the original Chinese positions. By the morning of September 12, the new frontline stretched from the North Railway Station to the eastern edge of Jiangwan, bent west of Yanghang and Luodian, and extended north to the banks of the Yangtze. Unbeknownst to them, the Japanese had become masters of heavily contested areas from Yangshupu in the south to Yuepu in the north. The Chinese military leadership attempted to explain to the public that it had no choice but to withdraw and had never seriously expected to be able to push the Japanese back into the Yangtze, given the hundreds of naval guns at their disposal. A military spokesman said “The objective of the Chinese command was to delay and harass the landing. It was never hoped that we would permanently repel the landing.” The Chinese expressed confidence in their new positions, even comparing them to the Maginot Line along the French border with Germany, which of course would become rather ironic. The Japanese now controlled the entire left bank of the Huangpu River from Yangshupu to the mouth of the Yangtze. They had access to several good roads, some interconnected, which could serve as supply lines for future attacks. Additionally, they could exploit a large number of modern Chinese wharfs and docks, setting the stage for a steady flow of reinforcements.  On the 12th, Matsui received word from the Amaya Detachment that it had finally captured Yuepu. After driving the Chinese out of the village, the detachment established a defensive perimeter in a semicircle 500 yards around the western edge. Nearly simultaneously, the Ueno Detachment, a unit attached to the 3rd Division, reported that it had occupied Yanghang and pursued the enemy to a position about two miles west of the village. In both cases, it appeared that the enemy had abandoned their positions under the cover of night. Yet despite the victories Matsui desperately needed more men. In the three weeks leading up to September 11, the Japanese had managed to land 40,000 soldiers and establish a bridgehead measuring roughly 25 miles in length and over five miles in depth. Together with the troops already present in Shanghai, Japan had about 50,000 soldiers in the area. While this was a significant force, it was still insufficient to ensure the conquest of Shanghai, especially given the rapid attrition faced. As of September 9, the 3rd Division had reported losses of 589 killed and 1,539 injured, while the 11th Division recorded 616 dead and 1,336 wounded. But Tokyo was very reluctant to dispatch troops to Shanghai. From the viewpoint of the IJA leadership, Shanghai and Central China were a sideshow to the north china theater, which they alongside the Kwantung Army argued was more essential, given the proximity of the USSR. This belief was strongly reinforced when the Sino-Soviet agreement was signed in late August. Shanghai also heavily favored the Chinese terrain wise, it was basically like the battle of Thermopylae, instead of a mountain pass it was an extremely concentrated urban area. Then there was one of the main advocates opposing the China War altogether, Kanji Ishiwara. The entire time he was screaming and lecturing non-expansion and advised diplomacy and to even form an alliance with China against the USSR. Concentrating on China and ignoring the Soviet menace was, in his eyes, like “chasing the dogs away from the front door while forgetting the wolves approaching the back door.” However, Ishiwara's reluctance to send more troops to Shanghai was overruled. On September 4, a meeting of officers in Tokyo concluded that the battle in the Shanghai area should be completed by late October or early November, and to that end, sufficient troops should be deployed. Three days later, Emperor Hirohito approved reinforcements for the Shanghai front, including the dispatch of three additional infantry divisions from the home islands, along with units from the garrison forces in Taiwan. Ishiwara was so upset by this decision that he submitted his resignation, although he was later appointed to a position in the army in northeastern China. There was little doubt among Japanese leaders that the deployment of these reinforcements marked a significant escalation in the war. The situation was unlike anything Japan had ever experienced before. Army Minister Sugiyama Hajime remarked in a statement to his commanders, “This war has become total war.” A junior Japanese officer inspecting the Shanghai front reported upon his return to Tokyo “The enemy resistance is undeniably strong. Whether they are bombed out or surrounded, they do not retreat.” Luodian had remained under Japanese control since late August, but the surrounding countryside largely remained Chinese territory. Despite increasing pressure after the Chinese withdrawal to the south on September 12, the Japanese advanced only slowly and hesitantly. Taken aback by the sudden gains at Yuepu and Yanghang, and revealing their typical tardiness in responding to unforeseen events, it took them several days to even dispatch patrols for probing attacks against the new Chinese defenses. This delay provided Chinese commanders with extra time to reinforce their positions near Luodian, particularly on both sides of the road from Yuepu, which they correctly assumed would be the primary route for the Japanese attackers. Chinese preparations were just one reason Japan's mid-September assault was only moderately successful. Like the Chinese, the Japanese had yet to develop much skill in coordinating infantry and armor operations. The road connecting Yuepu and Luodian was of relatively good quality, enabling the Japanese to deploy about 25 tanks as the spearhead of their thrust. These armored vehicles quickly eliminated the Chinese positions closest to the road and advanced rapidly toward Luodian. However, the accompanying infantry from the Amaya Detachment was unable to keep pace. The Japanese only held a few yards of terrain on either side of the road. Beyond that narrow strip, the area was swarming with Chinese soldiers, making the advancing Japanese infantry easy targets. The Japanese infantry became bogged down, and it was only after dark, when the Chinese defenders north of the road chose to withdraw westward, that the Japanese had a chance to reach Luodian. The debacle on the road to Luodian was not solely a result of flawed training within the Japanese ranks. The area around Shanghai, a patchwork of small farm plots divided by creeks and canals, was ill-suited for tank warfare. This terrain had previously been a key argument against large-scale deployments by the Japanese Army. Nevertheless, once the decision was made in Tokyo to send enough troops to win the battle for the city, the generals had to strategize ways to overcome these terrain challenges. One proposed solution was to deploy amphibious tanks. However, the tactics employed called for using the tanks in a supportive role rather than leading the attacks across waterways. If a creek needed to be crossed, Japanese commanders would first order a small infantry unit to wade or swim to the opposite bank and prepare it for the tanks to land under the cover of darkness. While it was still dark, the tanks would cross and provide support to the infantry by daybreak. This cumbersome procedure often felt like putting the cart before the horse, but the Japanese executed it precisely as prescribed, time and again. This predictability allowed their Chinese opponents to acclimate to Japanese tactics to such an extent that they could usually anticipate what the Japanese would do next. While flawed tactics prevented either side from breaking the stalemate at the Luodian front, both continued to pour in reinforcements. The Shigeto Detachment arrived from Taiwan and was attached to the 11th Division on September 14, the same day the Amaya Detachment made its way up the road from Yuepu to return to the division's direct command. By mid-September, the division had grown into a sizeable fighting force. However, the enemy it faced around Luodian was also growing stronger by the day, posing a significant threat to the division's right flank if it were to rush south toward Dachang to link up with the 3rd Division. Therefore, on September 18, the Shanghai commanders ordered the division to focus initially on eliminating the Chinese troops amassed around Luodian. By this time, heavy rain had already fallen in the Shanghai region for three days, gradually slowing the fighting. The Japanese disliked the rain, as it turned the roads into muddy rivers, making transportation difficult, if not impossible, while also grounding most of their aircraft. In contrast, the Chinese welcomed the lull, as it provided them with an opportunity to improve their positions. The challenge of breaking through the Chinese defenses was only becoming more difficult as time passed. The Chinese Army's performance during the initial stage of the fighting in Shanghai altered the world's perception of the nation's military capabilities. China, which had lost every war over the past century, invariably to nations much smaller than itself, had suddenly taken a stand. At Shanghai, the Chinese Army experienced more intense fighting than anyone could have anticipated, suffering losses that had taken years to build up. However, it had gained prestige and respect, even among its Japanese adversaries. Even the withdrawal on September 12 was met with sympathy and admiration in capitals around the world. Every journalist in Shanghai during the fall of 1937 had a story to tell about the remarkable Chinese soldier. American journalist Carroll Alcott spent many hours in dugouts in Zhabei. “While Japanese shells pelted down over their heads, the Chinese soldiers sat unfazed in their self-made caves, cooking rice, vegetables, and occasionally a small bit of pork over a charcoal brazier. They dispelled the inevitable boredom with games of checkers and mahjong and wrote letters home to their families. In the Chinese trenches, there was a sense of safety and a primitive kind of comfort”. Chiang Kai-shek had decided as early as September 15 that changes were needed at the top of the command in the 3rd War Zone. What this meant became clear six days later when Chiang sent two separate cables to the zone's senior officers. In the first cable, he announced that he would take over command of the 3rd War Zone from Feng Yuxiang, and dispatched him to the 6th War Zone further north. This was a sideways move rather than a direct demotion, but it undeniably removed Feng Yuxiang from the most crucial theater at the time. Despite this, the decision seemed logical to most senior officers in Suzhou. Feng Yuxiang had never effectively managed the 3rd War Zone during his time in command. None of his direct subordinates truly considered him to be in charge; instead, they continued to view Chiang as their actual commander. In the second cable of the day, Chiang Kai-shek went a step further by relieving Zhang Zhizhong of his duties as commander of the 9th Army Group. He replaced him with General Zhu Shaoliang, a staunch ally and, if possible, an even more vehement opponent of communism than himself. For Zhang Zhizhong, the decision was no major surprise, as he had faced Chiang Kai-shek's constant reproaches since the early days of the battle. Although Chiang initially selected Zhang due to his close connections with the divisional commanders he led, he grew increasingly disenchanted with Zhang's style of command characterized by “much talk and little action” and expressed his irritation both publicly and privately. There may have been an additional reason for this. Disagreements among the top echelons of the 3rd War Zone threatened to bring about paralysis. Zhang Zhizhong had not gotten along well with Chen Cheng, the commander of the neighboring 11th Army Group. Zhang had told anyone who would listen, “Chen Cheng isn't capable enough,”to which Chen retorted, “Zhang Zhizhong loves to show off.”  The strain that Shanghai was under also had an economic aspect. Although it had been a bumper year for both rice and cotton,  the two most popular crops in the area and many farmers were unable to harvest due to the continued heavy fighting around the city. Labor disputes simmered and occasionally erupted into open conflict. On September 14, a group of workers hired on short-term contracts by the Fou Foong Flour Mill in the western part of the International Settlement locked themselves inside and refused to leave until their demand for ten months' salary was met. Police and members of the Reserve Unit, a special anti-riot outfit, attacked the premises with tear gas and managed to disperse the protesters. Subsequently, ambulances transported 25 injured individuals to various hospitals from the mill. As if the city was not already suffering enough hardship, a cholera epidemic broke out, taking a particularly heavy toll on the poorest inhabitants. As of September 13, the outbreak had lasted for a month, with 119 confirmed cases and nine deaths. Less than a fortnight later, it had infected 646 people and resulted in 97 deaths. By early October, when the outbreak peaked, it had claimed a total of 355 lives. These statistics marked only the tip of the iceberg, as they accounted only for patients at hospitals in the International Settlement, excluding the likely much larger numbers in the Chinese part of the city. In a way, these individuals were collateral damage. A doctor who worked with the patients stated with a high degree of certainty that the disease had likely been brought to Shanghai by troops from the south. There existed a large villa overlooking Luodian they Japanese termed “the white house”. The Chinese forces had held the white house for four weeks, demonstrating fierce resistance. Encamped outside, the Japanese Army's 44th Regiment, known as the Kochi Regiment, was gradually being worn down, as their repeated attempts to storm the stronghold had failed. During their time at Luodian, the regiment had made numerous unsuccessful attempts to seize the villa. Limited artillery support hampered their efforts; logistical challenges meant each artillery piece received only one-fifth of its normal daily ammunition supply. On September 19, engineers began digging a tunnel from the trenches toward the White House. Four days later, they had excavated exactly 35 yards, effectively halving the distance the infantry would need to cross exposed ground before reaching the villa's defenses. A new attack was launched on the 23rd, beginning with an artillery bombardment, followed by air raids. Next, tanks advanced toward the walls, with small clusters of soldiers trailing behind. This attack included a surprise element for the Chinese defenders: as the offensive unfolded, a tunnel's entrance erupted open, allowing soldiers to emerge in single file close to the wall too quickly for the Chinese machine gunners to adjust their aim. The soldiers rushed forward, bearing heavy satchels of explosives. Pressing against the wall, they ignited the fuses and sought cover as loud explosions rang out. When the dust settled, the Japanese surged through the new openings in the walls, spreading out within the compound. After a fierce battle lasting two and a half hours, the building was captured by the Japanese troops. Despite losing the "White House," Lin Yindong, the commander of the 1st Battalion, was awarded an A-2 grade for the "Medal of the Armed Forces." He was also promoted to lieutenant colonel and appointed as the regimental attaché of the 66th Regiment for successfully defending the "White House" against a numerically superior enemy for nearly a month. The capture of the White House was part of a significant offensive launched by the 11th Division in the Luodian area. Initially scheduled for September 20, the operation faced delays of several days due to prolonged preparations, a common issue in the challenging countryside surrounding Shanghai. The division chose to attack south of the town with a narrow front to concentrate enough forces to deliver a powerful, unified strike against Chinese positions. The Japanese employed massed armor in their assault, deploying aircraft to neutralize any anti-tank weapons that emerged. These tactics proved effective, as the Chinese were pushed back in multiple sections of the front. To marshal sufficient troops for the attack, the division assigned the Shigeto Detachment to cover its right flank north and west of Luodian. However, the newly arrived detachment, full of morale, exceeded its mandate by launching a vigorous counterattack against the Chinese in its sector. Unfortunately, their efforts yielded little significant progress, and they suffered heavy casualties. As Matsui would report "The detachment has already had 200 casualties. They can't keep attacking blindly like this."  Further south, the 3rd Japanese Division also mounted attacks against Chinese forces, primarily around Liuhang. The fighting revealed Japan's material superiority, which was so pronounced that the Chinese refrained from deploying heavy artillery, even when available. Anti-aircraft guns were strategically positioned near artillery batteries, but the Chinese were reluctant to use them for fear of revealing their locations. Consequently, the Chinese Army found itself with virtually no air defense. Overall, local Chinese reserves struggled to repel the Japanese advances, leading to a shift from the see-saw battles that had characterized the front since early September. The Japanese gradually maintained their positions even after nightfall.  Despite their numerical superiority, defending Luodian proved nearly impossible for the Chinese forces. The Japanese's overwhelming firepower forced the Chinese into a defensive posture, preventing them from launching counterattacks until the enemy was almost upon them. Consequently, the decision was made to hold the entire town at all costs, a tactic that significantly increased the attrition rate within Chinese ranks. General Chen Cheng's army group experienced a casualty rate exceeding fifty percent, resulting in more than 15,000 losses. Additionally, units from Xue Yue's 19th Army Group participated in the combat southwest of Luodian and suffered severe casualties. The 59th and 90th divisions of the 4th Corps endured seventy to eighty percent losses within just five days. The training brigade of the 66th Corps reported 3,003 casualties after several days of fighting. Faced with these circumstances, Chinese commanders decided to execute another major retreat along the entire front north of Shanghai. They took advantage of a lull in Japanese assaults on September 25 to withdraw approximately one mile to a new defensive line. As before, this retreat was conducted with great discipline, and it took the Japanese two more days to fully comprehend that the Chinese forces had disappeared from their positions.  In the wake of these Japanese successes, significant changes began to unfold. The three divisions that the Japanese high command had dispatched to the Shanghai area in early September gradually arrived. First to land was the 101st Division, which started disembarking on September 22 and was ordered to position itself on the left flank of the 3rd Division. The 9th Division arrived in the same area on September 27, followed by the 13th Division on October 1. With these reinforcements, Japan now had five divisions stationed in Shanghai, compared to more than 25 divisions fielded by the Chinese. While China's numerical superiority was undeniable, the disparity was not as stark as it appeared. A typical Japanese division consisted of 15,000 men. Combined with the marines and infantry defending Hongkou, Japan had approximately 90,000 soldiers at its disposal in and around the city. In contrast, Chinese divisions often had as few as 5,000 men, making it unlikely that China deployed more than 200,000 soldiers in Shanghai at that time. Furthermore, the Japanese compensated for their numerical disadvantage with significant superiority in materials, aircraft, and naval artillery, which could still reach key areas within the Chinese front. Overall, the addition of the three new divisions significantly bolstered the Japanese forces, prompting Matsui and his staff to begin preparations for what they hoped would be the decisive strike against the Chinese defenders. Their plan was straightforward: they intended to execute a powerful thrust across Wusong Creek and advance toward Suzhou Creek. The goal was to encircle and annihilate the main Chinese force in a maneuver they had envisioned since their arrival in China. After all, encirclement was the cornerstone of Japanese military doctrine. I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. In August 1937, the Battle of Luodian raged as Chinese forces faced relentless Japanese attacks. After initial successes, the Chinese struggled under heavy casualties and dwindling morale. They fought fiercely to retain the critical town of Luodian, a vital transportation hub. Despite courageous defensive efforts, including a surprise night assault, the Japanese overwhelmed the Chinese with superior numbers and artillery. Encounters turned devastating, with both sides suffering severe losses. By late September, as the Japanese received reinforcements, the situation forced the Chinese to retreat, marking the beginning of a dire struggle for Shanghai's control.

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Lots of people have goals to write a book so we wanted to know what you would title your memoir, Bill gave us the best tip on how to diffuse any argument with your partner, and Bono hated his hair during U2's Live Aid performance so we wanted to hear your Big Day Fails. Plus! Someone added The Mix to their family group chat and then called us to talk about why! Catch up on everything you missed from today's show on The Morning Mix Podcast!Listen to The Morning Mix weekdays from 5:30am - 10:00am on 101.9fm The Mix in Chicago or with the free Mix App available in the Apple App Store and Google Play.Follow The Mix: The MixstagramGet the Free MIX App: Stream The MixSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Are you your own best advocate? In this episode, Laura Colón, VP of Sales and Alliances at Vonage, shares her personal journey of overcoming self-doubt and imposter syndrome, self-promoting both internally and externally, and building a personal brand to advance her career.  02:07 Overcoming Self-Doubt and Imposter Syndrome 04:15 Embracing a Growth Mindset 05:48 Building a Personal Brand for Career Advancement 11:54 Leverating Mentorship and Sponsorship for Growth 16:58 Self-Promotion Strategies  27:04 Career Sacrifices and Defining Moments 28:35 Communicating Your Value  31:24 Handling Pushback and Disagreements 35:20 Encouraging a Speak Up Team Culture  41:03 Life-changing Skill of Saying No  46:04 Open to Work: Beyond the Label Podcast 52:09 Final Thoughts and Takeaways   ✅ Free Newsletter:  https://assertiveway.com/newsletter/   ✅ Connect with Laura Colón https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauralynncolon/  Open to Work: Beyond the Label podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/open-to-work-beyond-the-label/id1809899342    ✅ Take the Quiz 'Do You Speak Like a High-Impact Leader?':  https://myassertiveway.outgrow.us/highimpactleader    ✅ Listen on the Speak Your Mind Unapologetically podcast on Apple Itunes:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/speak-your-mind-unapologetically-podcast/id1623647915      ✅ Listen on Spotify:  https://open.spotify.com/show/6L1myPkiJXYf5SGrublYz2   ✅ Order our book, ‘Unapologetic Voice: 101 Real-World Strategies for Brave Self Advocacy & Bold Leadership' where each strategy is also a real story: https://www.amazon.com/Unapologetic-Voice-Real-World-Strategies-Leadership-ebook/dp/B0CW2X4WWL/   ✅ Follow the show host, Ivna Curi, on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivna-curi-mba-67083b2/     ✅ Request A Customized Workshop For Your Team And Company:   http://assertiveway.com/workshops Contact me: info@assertiveway.com or ivnacuri@assertiveway.com Contact me on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivna-curi-mba-67083b2   ✅ Support The Podcast Rate the podcast on apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/speak-your-mind-unapologetically-podcast/id1623647915

When church conflict arises, the Word of God must be the final word. James closes the first church council by pointing to Scripture, affirming that God's plan has always included the Gentiles. Experience, miracles, and testimonies all aligned with the truth of God's Word. Disagreements may persist, but when the Bible speaks clearly, the church must follow.

In this episode of the Her Faith Inspires podcast, we're diving into a hot topic that's stirring up controversy in Christian circles: calling out false teachers. Recently, some Christian influencers have labeled others as heretics and demanded public repentance. But how do we know when someone is truly a false teacher—or when we've crossed the line into cancel culture? We'll look at: The difference between a heretic and a false teacher Biblical markers that identify false teachers (with insights from Titus) How to respond when Christians publicly call others out Disagreement isn't always heresy—and discernment isn't the same as division. Let's learn how to stand for truth withoutcompromising grace. Find Shanda www.shandafulbright.com Instagram & Facebook: @shandafulbright Email: hello@shandafulbright.com Free Resources: https://shandafulbright.com/links YouTube: http://bit.ly/ShandaYT2021 Store: www.Shandafulbright.com/shop  

It might seem like every conflict in marriage might not have a clear solution, but Scripture gives us a path forward. In this episode, Costi Hinn answers marriage questions from our listeners and explores what it means to stay faithful, speak the truth in love, and honor Christ—especially when challenges arise.Topics covered: -Narcissistic spouses-Unbelieving spouses-Setting boundaries with in-laws-Disagreements on life-changing decisions

How involved is the U.S. in Israel's war against Iran? Disagreement on the Right on how much America should be involved. Don't pet bison. Return of a hotdog-eating champion! Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the outs? Kris is headed to South America. Mel Gibson has a message for Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) and California Governor Gavin Newsom (D). Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks out on the immigrant situation, and the hosts of "The View" aren't thrilled. DOJ going after violent protesters from recent protests. 15 eggs went where??? National anthem in Spanish at MLB game. A U.S. senator cries on the Senate floor. How to handle U.S. representatives when they show up somewhere unannounced. NFL legend Terry Bradshaw's TSA experience. 00:00 Pat Gray Unleashed 00:39 America Has Air Control over Iran 01:33 Iran War Update 11:38 Tehran is Burning 13:32 Missile Launcher Taken Out 18:35 Trump on Iran Having Nukes 23:25 Iran Must Surrender 24:30 Ted Cruz vs. Tucker Carlson 27:57 Lindsey Graham Wants War? 31:18 Chewing the Fat 45:30 Fattest State in the Country 52:48 Karen Bass Continues to be Racist 53:39 Mel Gibson Message to Californians 55:34 Arnold Schwarzenegger DESTROYS the View 1:06:24 Best Arnold Schwarzenegger Movie? 1:08:04 California Riot Arrests 1:15:00 Nezza Sings the National Anthem in Spanish 1:21:22 Brian Lander Arrested by ICE 1:25:45 Alex Padilla Cries Victim During Congress Speech 1:32:25 Raja Krishnamoothi Visits ICE Facilities 1:33:48 Terry Bradshaw Problems at TSA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices