Podcasts about Gee

NOTICE: This weekly show is now part of the "Happy Hour with John Gaskins" daily podcast, which you can find at SiouxFallsLive.com, MidwestSportsPlus.com, and most podcast platforms like the one you find here! So, if you enjoy the topics Matt & John cover, you'll get those topics, plus relevant local guests, every Monday through Thursday on Happy Hour... so we highly recommend you check that out! So far in this young football season, the Jackrabbits, Coyotes, and Vikings offenses — to varying degrees — continue to struggle to explode for big plays and satisfying full-game performances. At times, they implode. In the Yotes and Vikings cases, for full games.Gee, if only there was a local team to watch right now, in-person!, that has provided fireworks all season long, including a so-far spectacular postseason. Oh, wait, there is, and you don't even have to drive one to four hours to see them.The Sioux Falls Canaries — highest-scoring, most home run-hitting in their league by far — are three wins away from their first American Association championship in 17 years and only their second league title in the 33-year modern inception of the club. So far, they've averaged 10 runs in their five playoff wins, including victories of 7-2 and 11-2 in their two series-clinching win-or-go-home games, propelled by the Birds' best-ever player and league's all-time career home run king Jabari Henry's five total dingers in those two deciding games (three blasts to eliminate league leader Sioux City in the first round on the road, then a pair of homers including a grand slam and 8 RBI in The Birdcage to knock out Fargo-Moorhead). So, before Happy Hour host John Gaskins and Sioux Falls Live sports editor Matt Zimmer break down the bummer offenses — to varying degrees! — of this region's three most popular football teams, they celebrate the culmination of what has been a 15-year climb up a Mt. Everest of rocky obstacles for the Canaries — once the league's worst and near-lowest-budget squad — just to return to the league finals.Then, it's pick-apart time for 3-0 SDSU, 1-2 USD, and the 1-1 Vikings, their offenses, and their quarterbacks Chase Mason, Aidan Bouman, and J.J. McCarthy. How much of the team's struggles have been the field generals' faults, and where do we see things headed?Is it unfair for Jacks fans to be unsettled if not complaining about "only" 37 points and "only" a 16-point win over a non-scholarship team? Is it five-alarm fire time for USD after narrowly escaping Northern Colorado and an 0-3 start?What do we make of both the seven quarters of bumbling of young J.J. McCarthy (save from the amazing fourth quarter in Chicago, which counts for a lot) and the ankle injury that has sidelined him against Cincinnati, which gives journeyman and NDSU legend Carson Wentz his latest and maybe last-ever shot to return to his once-Pro Bowl form?John and Matt answer these questions, then toast the Sanford International and its latest winner Retief Goosen. Finally, rumination on why the once-massive Sunday crowds have fizzled a bit in the eight-year-old event that shares crown jewel status in Sioux Falls with the Summit League Tournament.

The WNBA can't seem to take the opportunity to be a legitimate sports league. Pope Leo is being wishy-washy when it comes to bad behavior. And Great Britain is running into a little problem they haven't had to deal with since the 6th century. Gee, I wonder what changed.   Watch the video supplements to the podcast: https://rumble.com/user/DumbassesTalkingPolitics?e9s=src_v1_cmd Visit the Dumbasses Talking Politics web site for all show notes, videos, and links: https://rumble.com/user/DumbassesTalkingPolitics?e9s=src_v1_cmd Subscribe for free to Gene's Substack (Dumbasses Talking Politics): https://dumbassestalkingpolitics.substack.com/?utm_source=global-search  

In this episode, I introduce you to Trish K. who lives with her adult daughter and grandson. On long car drive home, Trish was listening to her older sister tell her about this thing called the Sunday Basket®. When Trish got home, she hopped on the website and got a Sunday Basket®. It just made sense to her, one place for all the paper and a system to process it? Sold! Trish enjoys the Sunday Basket®, the Productive Home Solution™, and the binders. But the biggest benefit she has gotten from Organize 365® was when she spoke outloud, her dream to walk the Camino Trail. Many years prior in night school another student shared she was taking 2 weeks to go walk the Camino Trail. Trish was in throws of active parenting and knew realistically she did not have 5 or even 2 weeks to go walk any portion of the trail. When Trish went through embrace and then attended the workshop with Rhonda afterwards, she remembered how to dream. And a long time dream resurfaced, walking the Camino Trail.  She's not one to share dreams unless she's prepared to take steps towards it. But in the safe space with no friends or family, she confessed she dreamed to walk the Camino trail without intent to do something about it yet. She got so much positive feedback from everyone in the group that she decided to go for it!  She trained for a couple of weeks before she told her family and friends what she was going to do. She walked the Camino Trail and documented it all through a blog. It was a spiritual journey that she suspected may break her emotionally but it didn't. She had a spiritual journey and learned a lot long the way, those 34 days and 500 miles. She got to walk through the country not buzz by in a car but really take in the beauty of Spain. She shared a few accounts with us in this interview. The blog started out just as a way to let “her community” know that she was ok and share updates.  A common thread in Organize 365® is “What's next?” It's funny you complete one room in your house and it's so rewarding that you think “What's next?” And Trish has realized to do the same with dreaming. So what's next on the dream list for Trish? To write a book. She got such great feedback from her blog that she wasn't intending to do anything with.  Now she's gonna write a book! She's dreaming now! It's no longer a mental barrier, she knows how to pursue a dream. She feels permission to think about what she wants, to use her resources on herself. She's bumped herself to the top of the list.  Community, we agreed, is the other theme that runs deep in Organize 365®. The community where everyone is so supportive and inspiring. Trish first got to try out her idea in this non judgmental community that offered nothing but support to her. Her now friends. They cheered her on along her journey, read the blog, and commented. That community kept her going. Dreams flourish in community!  When you are in community, people like Trish are an example of what is possible. And in community, you can lean on others' strengths. What you don't understand or see how to accomplish, someone in the group has been there, done that, and eager to help!  This community is so eager to help we talked a little bit about the Disaster Relief Resources where we can help people in need and ask for things we need. No one needs to go through things alone!  We are a community! Trish's advice is, “If you have internal messages questioning what you want to do come talk to someone in the Organize 365® community. Because they will give you the support and say ‘Do it!' ‘What do you need to do it?' What can I do to help you do it?' And to me, that's they same thing as ‘Gee, I have 18 boxes of paper or I have this whole house to organize.' It's all about starting…just starting.  Get the Sunday Basket® and just start. And if that's too much, start listening to the podcast.”  EPISODE RESOURCES: Trish's Blog: Listen and Bloom The Sunday Basket® The Paper Solution® The Productive Home Solution® Embrace - Self Guided Retreat Blitzes and Bootcamp Disaster Relief Resources Sign Up for the Organize 365® Newsletter  On the Wednesday podcast, I get to talk with members of the Organize 365­® community as they share the challenges, progress, missteps and triumphs along their organizing journey. I am grateful that you are reaching out to share with me and with this community. You can see and hear transformation in action. If you are ready to share your story with us, please apply at https://organize365.com/wednesday. Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Share this episode with a friend and be sure to tag Organize 365® when you share on social media!

Dr. Gee welcomes Harry Hawkins back to the show again to discuss what it means to lead a cross-cultural organization that is focused on empowering the Black community. Harry Hawkins has moved into the President and CEO role of the non-profit Nehemiah, as Dr. Gee transitions into new endeavors. The two innovative leaders discuss what it is like serving the Black community in a predominantly white community. They have both had to navigate cross-cultural environments in their work. The discussion covers drawing out underserved groups, like Black women and young Black men. Hear Harry Hawkin's background story and how his experience formed the skills needed for his work with Nehemiah. Justified Anger: Courses - Black History for a New Day Course alexgee.com Support the Show: patreon.com/blacklikeme Join the Black Like Me Listener Community Facebook Group

URSULA'S TOP STORIES: Luke Duecy live in Portland// Sully explains why traffic was so horrible this weekend // Root Sports shuts down // WE NEED TO TALK! Gee's interviewed JSN!  

Send us a textOkay, so here's the story: a rock and roll DJ is tasked with running a TV studio named after him. His young assistants are along for the ride, and they get into adventures of unspecified magnitude. Mainly because this show was [echo] LOST MEDIA!              Here now is the story of how this wolf rockin' show came to Saturday Morning.              Who was the Wolfman?              What do we know about this show?              Did I ever think I'd be able to cover this series? Hmmm…              All these questions, and more, will be answered in this look at WOLF ROCK TV! Roll it!Thanks for ‘tooning in. Visit our friends at CHERRY BOMBS: THE UNDERAPPRECIATED MOVIES PODCAST. Find Dustin and Nik here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cherry-bombs-the-underappreciated-movies-podcast/id1490726384 Share With Us: SatMornPod@hotmail.comBluesky: @SatMornPodYouTube Us: tinyurl.com/yyhpwjeo (Don't waste your time)   Featured Music:“Nostalgic Happy Music” by AudioJungle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxSUR6MQhw&t=2s “Happy Life” by Fredji - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzQiRABVARk Various Music by Oneul - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by302C2YhxY “I Feel You” by Kevin MacLeod” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw8E3jjbUCE “Nostalgic” by OrangeHead - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wExcRoNNzAc “Breakfast Club” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Spi22l3m5I “Horizons” by Atch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-u53MADIag “80's Hijack” by Gee - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndVqzJ9Lk6M&t=26s “Synthmania” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6r20TKnA6M “United” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArjGQFCcHxA “Cool Blue” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp5cxZWP-wc   #ABC #NBC #CBS #The80s #80s #cartoons #cartoon #animation #SaturdayMorning #1980 #1981 #1982 #1983 #1984 #1985 #1986 #1987 #1988 #1989 #Filmation #HannaBarbera #DePatieFreleng #RubySpears #Disney #WolfRockTV #WolfmanJack #music 

Luke's HAARP Time Warp: Part 2 The journey continues... Based on a post by somethin fishy, in 15 parts. Listen to the Podcast at Explicit Novels. Chapter 6. Luke had been off gathering food and firewood while waiting on Cecilia to get her lazy ass out of bed. It was getting to the point where he was going to break his promise and leave her sorry ass. She was lazy, incompetent, and greedy. Basically, all the traits that any American would think of when they heard the word; aristocracy. Marion on the other hand didn't share any of those traits and she was very intelligent to boot, but she had cracked and ran off when Luke had told her his darkest secret. This had saddened him deeply but then again; he was use to that in his life. Anytime something good happened to him, that good thing would then be ripped away again. Looking up while he was working on breaking up a branch, he saw a young man on a horse approach the camp carefully. As Luke watched the young man, he carefully looked through the camp as though he knew what he was looking for. Then apparently not finding it, the man retreated and took up a good hiding spot from which he could watch the camp without being seen. Luke was now on full alert. He started working his way around the stranger's hiding spot until Luke had got behind him. Luke might be a big man but he could still move through the woods like a ghost. As he came up behind the stranger, something about his clothes looked vaguely familiar to Luke, but Luke didn't have much time left because Cecilia was now starting to stir. Luke got up right behind the stranger and clamped his hand over the stranger's mouth. The stranger instantly began to fight back hard. It was all Luke could do to keep the stranger under control. During the struggle, the stranger's hat fell off, revealing long golden blond hair. Whoever this stranger was, they were strong and determined. Eventually the stranger was able to get turned around to where they were facing Luke, then all of the sudden they both stopped struggling. The stranger looked up at Luke's face revealing a pair of beautiful sapphire blue eyes. The stranger, Luke realized was none other than Marion and he let go. She then smacked him hard across his face. He was surprised that it actually stung pretty bad. What happened next stunned him even more. Marion jumped up, wrapped her legs around his waist, knocked him on his back, and kissed him just as fiercely as she had fought. Marion felt like her heart was about to burst, she had her lips on her man's lips again and this time around she wasn't going to let go. To make it better, she had knocked him over, so she was on top of him. Her hips began to move on their own as she started to grind her pussy against Luke. Between the kissing and the humping, Luke was now getting really fucking horny. After all, why not. Here was the most beautiful woman, that he had ever laid eyes on, on top of him and grinding her tight pussy against his stomach. Luke's eight-inch cock was now fully and painfully erect. Marion had moved one of her hands down and was starting to fiddle with the strings that held his pants up. Normally Luke would have been able to stop her, but between her delicious kisses and her beautiful body moving around on top of him; not very much blood was getting to his brain. Eventually, Marion got her hand into Luke's pants, where she got the surprise of her lifetime. Luke Was Huge! Marion felt like she had just grabbed hold of a horse. But of course, the feel of Luke's huge, hot cock in her hand stopped most of the blood from getting to her brain as well and her body felt like it was on full autopilot. The heat she felt increased drastically when Luke started moving his hands over her tits. When she touched her tits it had been pleasurable, but when Luke did it however, Marion lost all ability to reason. While his hands were big enough to completely cover her entire tits, he was extremely gentle with them. This went against everything she had ever been told by other women; in that when a man got ahold of tits, he almost always got very aggressive and that she should expect bruises afterwards. Marion now felt hotter than she had ever been before and started to rip her shirt off. Luke carefully helped her pull her shirt over her head. With her tits now exposed, Luke raised his head and started to kiss Marion's tits. He carefully circled each one with kisses while purposely avoiding her nipples. This was driving Marion mad for she really wanted Luke to suck on her nipples. Finally, she had enough of Luke's tease and grabbing his head put one of her nipples in his mouth. He got the hint and began to suckle on her. Marion started to feel extremely light headed as Luke continued his sucking. While he was sucking on one nipple, his giant hand was caressing and gently pinching the other one. Marion was now entering a state of ecstasy that she didn't know existed. When she had first started, she had expected Luke to quickly work at getting her pants off, but that's not even close to what Luke did. He didn't even try to push her, he just let her continue forward at her own pace. Luke had never liked to push the women that he slept with. He much preferred to let the woman set the pace. This actually annoyed many of the woman that he had been with, in his old life. Somehow, they all viewed this as weak on his part while never understanding the great amount of restraint that was required of him not to just stove his thick cock deep inside them. Luke had found that being well endowed was as much curse as blessing. Other guys were jealous of him while the gals seemed to fear him. That was always why he let the gal take the lead. He didn't want to hurt them. Here finally though, was a woman that didn't mind taking the lead. Kind of ironic really that Luke had to travel almost a thousand years into the past to find her. As Marion started to work her pants off, cursing them the whole time because if she had been wearing her dress, she would have already had Luke inside of her, she heard Cecilia calling for Luke. “Damn her anyway” scowled Marion “I swear every time things get interesting; she has to show up.” Looking at Luke, she could tell that he felt the same way. Luke was quietly laughing to himself, “So I'm guessing that I've been forgiven?” “How can a man from the future still be so dense, of course I've forgiven you. Now if I can only forgive myself be behaving like a bloody idiot.” “Nice contraction use, by the way.” “What can I say? Any time I get around you, your way of speaking speaks to me. On a different thought about being around me, you might want to hide for a minute or two until our friend here calms down a bit.” Luke smiled at her: “What can I say? There's something about having a goddess grinding her body against me that gets me all excited.” Marion lightly swatted him and giggled quietly. She had to be quiet because Cecilia wasn't more than ten paces away. Fortunately for the lovebirds, there was enough of a breeze to cover up their sounds. The two smiled at each other. Eventually, Cecilia moved back to the campsite. After she had moved away, Marion got up and having a naughty idea, turned her ass toward Luke's face, bent over at her waist, and reached down to retie his pants. The site of Marion bent over like that was driving Luke nuts, and his friend was showing that he didn't want to be contained. Marion leaned other over and whispered to Luke's cock: “Don't you worry, friend; I'll make sure to take very good care of you later.” Marion then retied Luke's pants and stood back up, making sure to flip her hair as she did. When she looked back at Luke, the look on his face was priceless. Marion knew that she now had Luke and nothing the Cecilia could do, short of killing her, could change that. This thought caused Marion to smile warmly at Luke as she moved to get her shirt that Luke had thrown off. After Marion had made herself presentable, she looked back at Luke and his cock was now behaving for the most part. This was good news for neither Marion or Luke were ready to reveal her return to Cecilia just yet. Finally, Luke stood up, gave Marion a quick kiss, moved back around to where he had left the firewood that he was gathering, picked it up, and returned to camp. Chapter 7. When Luke finally returned to camp, Cecilia gave him an earful about being late. The problem for Cecilia now was that Luke didn't give a shit about her. “What the hell are you bitching about this time, Cecilia. I am not the one who sleeps half the morning away. After all it has been light for three hours and you are just now waking up.” Cecilia was taken back. This was the first time that Luke had forcefully stood up to her. She would now have to take drastic action. She walked up to him and slapped him as hard as she could. “Don't you ever talk back to me; peasant!” she snapped. She then moved to slap him again. As her hand started to come up, something stopped her hand. Now very pissed, Cecilia turned to see what had stopped her. She was stunned to see Marion standing there. “Lay another hand on my man again and I will kill you” Marion stated calmly. “I don't care that you are my sister or that you have more support among the guards back home.” “Your man? Ha. You must be joking?” However, looking into Marion's face told Cecilia that she wasn't joking at all. “Like he would actually want to be with someone as dumb as you.” Marion's expression still hadn't changed so Cecilia spun around to look at Luke and caught him smiling. “What are you so happy about.” “Oh, just enjoying the sight of my girlfriend ripping you a new one.” “What!” Cecilia shrieked “How could you? Why would you? I am the one who you need to be with. After all she ran away.” “I will make this easy for you to understand, Cecilia. Marion is a delight to be around, while you are a pain in my ass. Marion always asks intelligent questions and provides stimulating conversation; while with you, well let's just say that I have had better conversations with corpses. She is very willing to learn and equally willing to admit when she made a mistake; you on the other hand seem to have no interest in learning and are not willing to admit that you could make a mistake never mind that you did. And finally, while I do admit that you are a beautiful woman, Marion is a goddess. Also, your beauty is only skin deep while hers goes all the way to her bones. Do not think for an instant that I have no idea of what you were planning to do once I got you home. I have known since you started trying to seduce me that you would do everything possible to force me into telling you everything that you wanted to know even though you are not capable of handling the information that I have access to” Said Luke with a smug grin. Cecilia just stood there stunned. Nobody had ever talked back to her before and now here were two people that not only talked back to her, but one of them was her younger sister and the other one Cecilia just classified as a large but dumb peasant. Apparently, he wasn't as dumb as Cecilia thought, but that didn't matter. What neither Luke or Marion knew was that Cecilia was actually very good with a knife and that she had helped set up the ambush with William. She had wanted her father, John, and especially Marion killed so that she could rule alone over her family's land. Granted she would have to marry William, but she had planned to arrange for William's father to die of an accident shortly after the wedding. Then within a year, kill William in some way so that she would control both family's lands. Now the entire plan had come completely unraveled. William was dead and Marion was alive. Furthermore, Marion had managed to gain the favor of the man that had “rescued” them from the ambush and now she had even won him over completely. Cecilia knew that it was too early to try and kill them for they would be expecting her to try something so she just backed down from the argument that they had been having. Just to rub salt into Cecilia's wounds, Marion went over and stood next to Luke who then put his arm around Marion. Cecilia would know have to be very careful indeed. Cecilia stomped back to the carriage and sat down. Luke went to tend the fire, and Marion went to get her horse. After Marion got back, she went up to Luke and kissed him. This made Cecilia fume even more, for her life long campaign to keep Marion subdued and meek was also coming undone. Marion was quickly gaining self-confidence and strength and if Cecilia didn't do something quickly, she wouldn't have any chance at all of getting Luke to cooperate; even under torture. After Marion got done making out with Luke, she whispered to him “We need to talk alone and quickly.” Luke nodded his agreement for he figured what Marion needed to talk about after all a blind idiot could have figured it out just from feeling the tension between Marion and Cecilia. After Luke had finished making breakfast and everyone had eaten, the three of them got back on the road. Cecilia drove the carriage while Luke and Marion rode their own mounts. Luke had also put all his gear on one of the spare horses. He covered it with some cloth to hide it, and while it was weird looking at least nobody would see his modern gear. By late afternoon the group was at the gates of Nottingham. Luke intended to stop here and sell all the extra stuff. Marion fully agreed with this for it would be much easier traveling without the carriage. To their surprise, Cecilia also agreed for she had enough of ridding in that damn thing and the roads would get worse the closer they got to York. She still had to get home before she could make her move. When they first got into town, Luke insisted that before they sell anything that the three of them explore the town to find out what all goods and services were available. Doing that took the rest of the day. Finally, they agreed on an inn that was reasonably priced and had decent food. They had rented two rooms, and after eating, decided to retire for the evening. It had been a very long day. Included in the room price was a small bundle of firewood and a set of blankets. Luke took all his gear up into his room after all this stuff was irreplaceable and held immeasurable amounts of knowledge. He started a fire and then checked out the room looking for listening holes or false walls before revealing his modern gear. After a bad experience with a high school girlfriend, Luke always thoroughly checked out every new room that he slept in. Looking at the bed, Luke decided that he would more likely be more comfortable on the floor so he set up his mattress pad and sleeping bag. Before he laid down, he stripped. This was the first time that he had been completely naked since before he had left home on his hunting trip and it felt so good to finally be without clothes, especially those itchy medieval things. To wind down, Luke fired up his computer to listen to some music and look at some pictures of his family. He made sure that he had his earbuds secure so that no one else would hear the music. Finally, he started getting tired and put his computer away. Just as he was shutting his eyes, there was a soft knock at the door. Cecilia and Marion had taken the larger of the two rooms since there were two separate beds in it. The atmosphere in the room was colder than the artic in midwinter. Neither woman wanted anything to do with the other one. Cecilia made sure to try both beds and took the most comfortable one. ‘Let that bitch figure out her proper place in the world' was Cecilia's thinking. Marion laid down on the other bed and tried to go to sleep but she was restless. She didn't trust Cecilia at all and wouldn't put it past her to take a knife across her throat during the night. Marion finally noticed that Cecilia was asleep. As quietly as she could, she climbed out of bed and left the room, closing the door softly. She quickly went to Luke's door and after breathing in a deep breath and saying a quick prayer that he was still awake knocked on the door. Chapter 8. Luke hurried up and threw his pants back on to get the door. Quietly opening the door, he carefully stuck his head out around the door. Standing there was Marion. Luke quickly finished opening the door for her and she came in. “What's the matter sweetheart, can't you sleep?” “Not in the same room as my sister. She is really starting to make me nervous. I'm actually worried that she would stick me, with a knife, while I slept. I was kind of hoping that there would be some room with you.” With that she gave Luke some of the saddest puppy eyes imaginable. Luke just smiled and put his arms around her. He gently led her to where he was sleeping. “Why are you sleeping on the floor, Luke?” “An old injury that I got years ago makes it hard for me to sleep on soft beds. By having a harder surface to lay on, it takes the pressure off and I can sleep.” “Oh, I'm sorry.” “That's okay. After all you didn't know.” “Wow, contractions really do make speaking faster and easier.” “Yep” With that, Luke dropped his pants again. There was just enough light coming from the dying fire for Marion to see that Luke was now naked. She suddenly wasn't tired at all but now had a fire burning, in her loins that was hotter than a smithy's furnace. She quickly stripped off the gown that she had on and got under the covers with Luke. Feeling her skin, Luke figured out that Marion was naked too and what she had in mind. “Are you...” was as far as he got before a pair of plump lips sealed off his mouth. He certainly wasn't going to argue any further after all; as the saying goes “His mama didn't raise no fool.” Marion used one of her hands to reach down and grab Luke's cock. This time at least she wasn't surprised by its size. Luke broke her kiss and using both of his hands, held her face. “Sweetheart, is this your first time?” “Yes” Marion squeaked fearfully. “Then why are you rushing. Let's slow down a bit so you can savor your first time. Plus, I don't want to hurt you.” Marion shed a tear and Luke kissed it off her face. At that point she knew that Luke was truly in love with her and that she had nothing to fear from him. What followed was the most intense time of her life. Luke started by kissing her neck. Just his kisses on her neck caused her to have mini orgasms. He then moved slowly down to her tits. He moved in circles around each one smothering them in kisses, but not touching her nipples and when she tried to move a nipple into his mouth, he just pinned her down. Finally, mercifully Luke started moving further south; still without touching her nipples. He kissed his way down her stomach and when he got to her navel she started giggling. She had never been ticklish but Luke's kissing her belly button really got to her and she couldn't hold still to save her life. This brought much joy to Luke, who hadn't been with a woman in years. ‘Yep, I still got it' he thought. Luke then moved down each of her legs, avoiding her pussy. By the time he had finished her second leg, Marion wasn't really on Earth anymore. At least not mentally. Luke then spread her legs. ‘Oh god, I'm finally going to become a woman and the man that's going to make me a woman, I couldn't love more' thought Marion. Luke had other plans though. Instead of his cock he started out with his tongue. This completely surprised Marion for she had heard nothing like this ever discussed by the other women in the castle. What Marion then discovered was that there were more layers of pleasure then she ever realized. She could feel Luke's hot breath on her moist skin and could feel the stubble on his face brushing against her. Most of all she could feel his tongue working its way into her slit. When it hit her clit, she took a deep breath and froze. Luke worked his way up and down her slit causing Marion to start involuntarily thrusting her hips. Luke gently held her down and this really drove Marion wild. “you might want to cover your face, with a pillow or something sweetheart, so you don't wake up the whole inn.” Luke said giggling. Luke then continued working Marion's pussy like a fine musical instrument. Up and down her slit he moved. Marion wasn't just leaking nectar anymore; her pussy was now a flash flood zone. Finally, Luke sucked her clit in between his teeth and Marion would have completely jumped off the floor if Luke hadn't been holding her down. She screamed at the top of her lungs, into the pillow, for almost thirty seconds before collapsing. Luke had taken pity on her and stopped tonguing her. He waited until her breathing had become more regular before he started kissing his way back up her body. This time he worked both nipples before moving up to her lips. “What did you do to me? I've never felt anything that good in my life.” “And just think, that wasn't even the main course.” Marion's eyes now shot open as she felt the tip of Luke's cock on her slit and she started moaning softly. He moved the tip up and down her slit a few times to make sure that it had sufficient lubrication on it. The last thing he wanted was to hurt his lover. Being happy with the amount of lube; Luke put the tip right at her entrance and stopped. Marion looked up at him, nodded and smiled. Luke began to gently push into her most delicate and personal area. She was thankful that Luke was going slow because she felt like she was being split open as Luke pushed up into her. Luke stopped again, when he felt her hymen. He gently kissed Marion as he whispered in her ear: “You sure sweetheart?” Marion just nodded again; her throat wouldn't let her speak at the moment. Luke thrust all the rest of the way into her in one stroke and stopped when he had bottomed out. Marion was now crying and Luke was kissing her tears as fast as they formed. Eventually Marion opened her eyes, “I am now all yours to do what you want with.” She would never know why she muttered that line, not for all her years would she ever be able to figure it out. She could have then sworn that she saw Luke's eyes flash fire red, and he got very angry with her. He grabbed her face roughly and held it so that her eyes were locked onto his. What she saw at that moment absolutely terrified her for she had never seen someone so angry. “Now, you listen Marion and you listen to me good” started Luke in a deep growl that sounded more like it was made by a wild animal then a person “You are not mine to do with what I want. You are you. Your body is Yours to share as You please. If we do proceed with a relationship it will be as equals, as partners. Not as master and servant. If we ever do anything you don't like all you have to say is stop and we'll stop.” “But why?” Marion was now more confused than she ever had been before. “Why am I not yours's to do with as you please.” She saw Luke close his eyes, take a deep breath, and when he opened his eyes again, she saw there was nothing but love in them. “Because Marion of York I love you more the life itself. You are not inferior in my mind. The only way I want this relationship to happen is if it's between equals.” Marion started sobbing as she wrapped her arms around Luke's neck. Finally, she was able to mutter the most important words in the world, into his ear. “I love you too, Luke!” With this Marion's pussy took back over, after all Luke's cock was still inside her. Before long Luke was slowly thrusting in and out of her. The sensations that Luke's cock caused made Marion lose her mind. Within a minute she had another orgasm. This one blew away the one that Luke had given her with his tongue and the only thing that kept Marion from screaming her head off was Luke's lips locked onto hers. What followed was one orgasm after another, for Marion. From everything she had ever heard, sex was something that lasted maybe five minutes from start to finish. Of course, everything else that she thought that she knew had already been shattered by this man, why not the amount of time spent engaged in sex as well. Most of the time Luke stayed on top, but he did roll over and swing her on top toward the end. He did this so that he could last longer for Marion. Marion's body quickly figured out what it liked. It not only went up and down, but it went side to side and even moved about in circles while searching for the perfect spot. By this time Marion's brain was barely functioning. Luke then rolled back on top and began thrusting faster and faster. Marion was barely keeping her moaning under control as Luke neared the finish. Then Marion felt Luke's cock swell up even more and she was hit with an earthshattering orgasm that didn't stop until after Luke had shot what felt like gallons of hot sticky cum deep into her. This last orgasm caused Marion to black out completely. Luke fell over on his back next to her, completely drained. Marion's body somehow crawled up and her head rested on Luke's shoulder. Luke managed to get a blanket over them and pass out. Luke woke up the next morning to someone knocking on the door. “Yes, what is it?” he managed to get out. “The cook would like to know what you want for breakfast?” said one of the inn's staff. “Umm, can you give me a little bit so I can finish waking up, then I can take to the cook about breakfast?” “Yes sir.” “Okay then. I will be down in a bit.” Luke gently shook Marion awake. The look on her face was beyond priceless for Luke. She still looked like she was in orbit from last night and her hair was a mess. “Good morning, sweetheart” he said cheerfully. “What a rotten thing to say to someone who doesn't know where they are at.” Groaned Marion Now Luke couldn't resist “Well last time I checked you were, in a room, at an inn in Nottingham, having one mind altering orgasm after another.” This time Marion gave him the stink eye “Gee thanks for that update…Smartass” “Hey it's far better to be a smartass then a dumbass.” Said Luke with a shit eating grin. Now it was Marion's turn to smile. “Come on Marion. It's time for breakfast and I'm starving. Plus, we have a lot to do today. “Fine” said Marion trying her best to sound cross but she couldn't keep the smile off her face. Before long they were both laughing like idiots as they worked towards getting dressed. Luke took a bucket of water and a rag to clean Marion's pussy up a bit, and then she took the rag and cleaned Luke's cock off. When they were both happy, they got dressed and went down to eat. On the way out of the room, Luke made sure that it was locked and then he put one of his hairs carefully in the lock to tell him if anyone tried to get into his room while they were gone. Breakfast was simple, consisting of some bread and veggies. Luke then asked the cook if he could get some eggs made up. The cook looked at him like he was weird but made them anyway after all when the customer is bigger than a horse, it's not a good idea to argue. Luke shared his eggs with Marion and she shared some of her stew with Luke. They both had an ale to wash everything down with. As they were finishing up, Cecilia came down the stairs. When Cecilia saw them, she went to sit at a table in the corner. If looks could kill then Marion would have been dead with the looks that she was getting from her sister, but by this time Marion didn't give a shit about her anymore. Luke paid for their meal and he paid for Cecilia's as well. He wanted to make sure that the innkeeper got the money due them because he knew that Cecilia had a habit of throwing her rank around to get out of paying for things. Marion and Luke went back upstairs and collected their gear. They both looked around both rooms to make sure that they didn't miss anything. Then they locked the doors back up and returned downstairs where they paid for the rooms and returned the keys. Marion walked over to Cecilia and gave her the bag with her stuff in it. “Whenever you finish, Luke and I will be selling the extra stuff. You can come and find us.” With that Marion walked off without giving Cecilia a chance to say anything. The innkeeper of course knew what was going on because Marion had told him. Luke and Marion went outside and got the horses and carriage from the stable. The first stop was an armorer down the street. There after much bargaining, Luke managed to sell all the extra swords and knives they had. He also sold all the armor. None of it fit either of them so why keep it. The next stop was a cloth maker to sell the extra clothing that they had. This time Luke bought a new outfit for himself, one that actually fit somewhat comfortably, and so they went through the town. After they hit a dead end with the carriage, Luke had an idea. They broke the carriage down into its pieces and sold the pieces. They actually made much more money doing this then they would have made by selling it in one piece. “What made you think of that Luke?” Marion asked him after they had finished. “Back in my time, a lot of vehicles were sold that way. You would sell all the usable parts off then scrap everything else. Here we didn't have to scrap anything, lucky for us” Luke whispered back. The last stop was to sell the extra horses. They only really needed three, but decided to keep an extra two just in case and as pack animals. As Marion and Luke were coming out of the stables, Cecilia finally caught up with them. To say that she was pissed was an understatement. It was now late afternoon and she had been going all over town looking for Luke and Marion. She couldn't wait until she could get rid of Marion and get revenge on Luke. One plus side of her wondering the town was that she had met some old friends. After some short negotiations, Cecilia had another ambush set up. This time she made sure to warn them about Luke. The ambush would take place outside of town so that it looked random. As Cecilia came up to them, Marion told her that they would be leaving immediately since they had gotten everything sold. This threw a wrench into Cecilia's plans however. She had figured that they wouldn't leave until tomorrow. She had to delay them. “Are you sure, I mean there are reports of bandits out there?” “What, you scared sis?” teased Marion. Cecilia noticed that Marion was now carrying herself taller and she now wore a short sword and knife at her waist. “Where did you get those?” asked Cecilia pointing at Marion's sword and knife. “Luke got them for me, from the armorer. He actually knows a lot about swords and knives.” Cecilia just looked at Luke. “Yep, guilty as charged. I use to make swords and knives when I was younger and I still make an occasional knife when I can get the chance.” From the looks that Marion was giving Luke, Cecilia was sure that they had sex the night before. “So, I guess that you finally started whoring yourself out, Marion. It was only a matter...” Smack! That was as far as Cecilia got before Marion knocked her to the ground. “You call Marion a whore again and you will be eating all your teeth” growled Luke with fire in his eyes. Cecilia sat on the ground more afraid than she had ever been because at the moment Luke didn't look like a human, no, he looked like one of the Titans from Greek mythology that had come to life. Luke hunched back on his heals slightly and Cecilia actually peed herself because she was so scared. Many predators hunched back slightly before attacking and Cecilia was truly terrified of Luke attacking her with the anger that was still in his eyes. Marion patted Luke on his arm and the fire disappeared, from his eyes, and he relaxed. “Come on Luke, we need to get going.” Chapter 9. The three of them left town that afternoon. Marion was no longer afraid of bandits. Not with her new side arms and boyfriend. Now it was Cecilia who was terrified. She was still unarmed and worse still she had managed to thoroughly piss off Luke. After all this was a man that she had seen snap another man's neck and elbow without breaking a sweat. To make matters worse for Cecilia, she had to watch as Luke picked Marion up and gently put her on her horse. He did this without struggling a bit. This was something that Cecilia had never seen before. She had never seen someone so strong and yet so caring and she was extremely jealous of Marion's relationship with Luke. The whole way Cecilia was hanging behind, trying to slow Luke and Marion down, but they barely slowed down at all. Cecilia could see them talking and laughing, but she couldn't hear from where she was at, and if she caught up so that she could hear then she wouldn't be able to slow them down. After almost five miles, the trio came across a stream with a meadow next to it and with the sun setting Luke decided that this was a good spot to stop for the night. Cecilia was glad for she was exhausted. It really irritated her to see Marion still full of energy. Luke of course never seemed to run out. Marion started on the camp site while Luke caught some fish for supper after gathering firewood. Cecilia managed to take care of the horses. She didn't tie the knots as good as they should have been, for she hoped that the horses would bolt during the night. She sat near the fire as Luke and Marion prepared dinner. Along with dinner, Marion was boiling the water for their canteens. After dinner, which was actually really good Cecilia had to admit to herself; she would never admit it publicly. Marion walked over to the horses. She had seen Cecilia tie the bad knots while she was setting up camp and wanted to fix them before bed. When she got back, she and Luke gave Cecilia an evil look which sent chills up and down Cecilia's spine. She now knew that she wouldn't be able to do anything else to slow them down. She got another surprise at bedtime; they were not going to be sleeping in the tent. Instead, all the gear went into the tent and Marion had the bedrolls set up outside. The final surprise came when Marion and Luke settled down under the same blanket. Luke was behind her with his arms around her. She was using one of his arms as a pillow and Marion passed out quickly. Cecilia watched for a chance to kill Marion, but Luke stayed alert all night. All he ever did was doze off and the slightest sound would cause him to wake up. To make matters worse for Cecilia, Luke had his handgun under one of his hands ready for him to grab at all times. Cecilia didn't know what that devil device was but she did know what it could do. Eventually she gave up and fell asleep. The next morning, Luke was up with the sunrise as usual and Marion got up with him. They got the fire going and tore the tent down and hide it away. By now they had the routine down pat. This morning though was already a warm one and both of them had been sweating all night. Luke took Marion down to a pool in the stream and they stripped down. At first Marion thought that she was going to get laid again. Then when they were both naked, Luke picked her up and threw her in the stream. “Damn it, you bastard! It's fucking cold in here” Marion cried out standing up. The water was up to the bottom of her tits. Luke just laughed as he jumped in and further drenched Marion with water. The two of them cleaned each other making sure that every nook and cranny was clean. They splashed each other and had a lot of fun. Luke made sure that Marion's hair was washed out and that her pussy was thoroughly cleaned. Marion made sure that Luke's cock and balls were clean enough to eat off of. Eventually they got out of the water and dried themselves off on a blanket that Luke had brought along, just for that purpose. They then put clean clothes on and went back to camp. There Cecilia was still sleeping so Marion walked over to her and woke her up with water to the face. “Hey time to get up!” barked Marion. Luke just stood back and laughed. Marion was starting to sound like some of his drill instructors. This time Luke fixed breakfast for everyone. Cecilia had bags under her eyes; she really hated mornings. By the time breakfast had been eaten, Cecilia was beginning to function and she had some questions for Marion as they were finishing packing. “Hey Marion, I got a question for you. When you woke me up, why were all wet?” “Oh, Luke and I took a bath in the stream.” “Why people will think that you're a Jew or something?” “Luke said that he felt really grimy and that he couldn't stand his smell anymore. I thought that we were going down by the stream for of loving but when I was naked, he picked me up and threw me in. He jumped in after me and we made sure that each other was really clean.” “If Luke said that he needed a bath then why were you surprised to be thrown in the water?” “Because he didn't tell me that until after he had thrown me in.” Cecilia actually had to laugh. She couldn't help it for it was too damn funny. It served Marion right for stealing Luke from her. Marion was beat red from embarrassment. This wasn't helped when Luke came up behind her and gave her a big sloppy kiss. Marion started to laugh as she leaned back into Luke and wrapped his arms around her. She had never been this happy before. This display of affection wiped the smile right of Cecilia's face. Finally, Luke announced that it was time to go. The three mounted up and resumed their travels. As they went along, Cecilia kept her eyes peeled. She was looking for the prearranged signs that the ambush was ahead. To her dismay she didn't see one, however about noon, Luke stiffened up, suddenly stopped, and pulled his horse off to the side of the road. He just made it look like he had to take a leak. After he was done, he motioned for Marion and Cecilia to join him. “There's an ambush about fifty paces ahead.” “How could you possibly know that?” asked Cecilia. This probably wasn't her ambush but one ambush was as good as another as far as she was concerned. “Because I saw a glint in the brush near the road. The same place that I would set an ambush.” “You sound like you have experience with ambushes” Marion said. “I do” stated Luke in a hard flat tone that said the discussion was over. “So, what are we going to do?” asked Marion. “Simple, I'm going to ambush the ambushers.” “How?” Marion was almost crying now. “Just stay here and watch.” And with that, Luke pulled his handgun and knife out and disappeared into the forest. Within minutes, shots rang out up ahead and the ladies heard several screams. Marion looked like a ghost and even Cecilia had lost some color. Then everything was quiet. Both ladies were nervous; Marion for her lover and Cecilia because she wanted his knowledge. “Miss me?” Luke said causing both ladies to almost jump out of their clothes. “Damn it Luke” screamed Marion “Don't do that to me ever again!” “What's that?” now Luke was feeling mischievous. “I was so scared that you would be killed.” Said Marion so quietly that Cecilia could barely hear her. Luke just snorted. “Me killed by those idiots.” Snorted Luke “Not likely. Come on ladies, we got some bodies to loot.” Luke and Marion grabbed the horses and lead them to where the ambush had been. There was fifteen men laying on the ground. “We're not going to worry about burying them. There's a nice dip in the ground back there” Luke pointed behind him “That we can dump the bodies into.” The three of them quickly gathered all the gear that they could use. Luke of course policed his brass. They even found some more horses to carry the loot. Part of the loot was a large bag of money and some really nice swords. Marion recognized the crest on one of the swords as one that belonged to a very wealthy family that lived a couple of days ride from her own home. It was only the work of an hour or so to get all the new loot and get it stored for travel. As they were getting to leave, Marion heard more horses coming, and the three of them hid in the brush. Cecilia immediately recognized the men that went by, for they were the ones that she had hired. After they had went by Luke stood up. “Come on ladies, let's get the fuck out of here.” The three of them mounted back up and continued on their journey. It was obvious that Luke was now on high alert for anymore ambushes. Fortunately, they didn't see anything the rest of the day. Problem was that they hadn't come across any good places to stay for the night. To Luke this wasn't a problem; they would push on through the night. They had light cloud cover and a particle moon. “Hey Marion, how close are we, do you figure?” Marion purged her lips as she figured, “probably four or five days. Why?” “Okay, here is what we are going to do. I didn't like the look of those guys that past by us earlier, and it's too easy to ambush people in the forest so we are going to push on through the night.” “But how about our sleep?” whined Cecilia “Tired is just temporary, dead is permanent. We push on through the night, but if you want to stop for the night go ahead but I'm going to keep going.” “Marion are you going to stop?” asked Cecilia “Nope. I'm staying with Luke. I almost lost him once and I'm not going to make the same mistake twice.” Now Cecilia was worried. They would probably go right past her ambush during the night and her guys wouldn't see them because no one ever traveled at night. Chapter 10. Marion readies her attack. The three of them pushed on through the night, just as Luke had said. By the next morning, Cecilia was almost asleep in the saddle and Marion wasn't too far behind her. Even Luke was getting tired but he was used to it. When jetting all over the world ever week, you get use to not sleeping or grabbing cat naps whenever possible. They didn't even stop to make breakfast. Today, breakfast was whatever was in the saddlebags that could be eaten cold. During the night, Luke had come up to a fork in the road and had decided to make a slight detour to Lincoln to sell the loot gathered from the ambushers. The ladies didn't even notice the fork for they were both dozing off. Marion was the first one to realize that they were not on the road to York. “Of course, not” replied Luke “We're on the road to Lincoln. I want to sell all the extra loot we got and get some comfortable sleep.” Both ladies agreed if only so that they could get some good sleep. Luke was quietly amazed; he actually got those two to agree on something. He still didn't trust Cecilia any and probably never would. It was midafternoon before the trio got to Lincoln. It took them a couple of hours to sell the extra gear. While they had been going around selling the gear, they had found a good inn to stay at. Problem was that they were only able to rent one room. ‘Oh well' thought Luke. They finished selling the stuff and got back to the inn; they were glad that they had rented the room earlier for the inn was now packed. After a quick dinner, the three of them went to the room and settled in. Luke of course checked out the room. Cecilia was now curious: “What are you doing?” “Looking for hidden rooms or listening holes. I had a bad experience one time and ever since I always check out new rooms. Once in a while I actually do find hidden rooms or listening holes.” “Oh” “It's far better to be safe than sorry.” Finding none, Luke started to settle down. Marion had already gotten their bedroll out. Cecilia was actually amazed that she didn't have to fight for the bed. She soon figured out why for Luke laid down with Marion. Before long clothes were flying out from under their blankets. Cecilia couldn't believe it; Luke and Marion were going to go at it right in front of her. Marion had just laid down and curled up under the covers. She so enjoyed the feeling of Luke's bedding on her skin that she almost fell asleep immediately. She moaned slightly when she felt Luke lay down with her. Before long she was getting warm and not just from Luke's body heat. Her hands started to move by themselves and soon locked onto Luke's manhood. Luke wasn't sure if they should do anything with Cecilia in the room but the feeling of Marion's hands gently tugging on his cock settled that issue for him; to hell with Cecilia. His hands started to roam Marion's body, their lips locked, and Marion moaned into his mouth. Their hands started tearing at each other's clothing and they couldn't get naked fast enough. Clothes flew out from under the covers for they didn't want some clothes to get in their way. By the time she was naked, Marion's pussy was gushing like the Amazon during the rainy season and Luke was hard enough that he probably could had smashed granite. Marion pushed on Luke's shoulders, signaling that she wanted to start out on top. This was just fine with Luke. Marion impaled herself completely in one shot and started to ride him like he was a rodeo bull. Problem was that, in her haste, she had forgotten about her moaning, and by the time she started getting loud, about five seconds after bottoming out, she didn't give a fuck anymore. She then became determined to give the inn some good vocal entertainment and announce, to the world, that Luke was hers. As Luke caught up to her, she was singing like an opera singer from a much later time, but she didn't know that and didn't care. Luke was again making her feel amazing. An added bonus for her was that Cecilia was in the room with them and Marion wasn't about to waste this opportunity to show off what she and Luke could do together. Within minutes of impaling herself, Marion was cumming by the bucket loads. Meanwhile Luke hadn't been quiet either and with Marion's juices coating his balls he didn't care. He was pounding away at Marion's beautiful body from below and after she exploded, Luke flipped them over so that he was on top. It was time for him to show off a bit. He took Marion's feet and put them on his shoulders. In this way he could bend Marion in half and drive deep into her. Just as he knew it would, this position caused Marion to start screaming at the top of her lungs. The biggest problem that Marion was having was being able to even form words. While Luke and Marion were fucking, Cecilia at first was disgusted with her little sister. After all, what god fearing woman would want to see her unmarried sister getting laid, never mind that Cecilia was no slouch in the getting laid department. As Marion was having her second orgasm however, Cecilia started to have strange feelings; she was getting wet between her legs, her pussy was getting hot, and her nipples were hard as rock. She couldn't believe that she was getting aroused at the sight of her little sister getting the stuffing pounded out of her. Then Luke had rolled over and Cecilia got her first glimpse of Luke's manhood. The sight took her breath away. It looked like Marion was getting fucked by a horse! ‘How the hell did she even get that… that… that thing inside her?' thought Cecilia as her hands started rubbing her tits and pussy. Not getting the feeling that she was after; Cecilia flipped her nightgown up so that she could get unblocked access to her pussy. Cecilia saw Marion look at her and she was wasn't surprised to see Marion's eyes were completely glazed over and her jaw slack. As Luke pounded Marion; Cecilia matched his pace with her hand and quickly had a powerful orgasm of her own. As she recovered, she was amazed to see that Luke was still pounding Marion, only now the two of them were on their sides; facing Cecilia. Cecilia got to watch as Luke's giant hands roamed all over Marion's body, and Marion's hands disparately trying to get a hold of anything so that she could maintain some connection with Planet Earth for she was now having almost continuous orgasms. Marion's tits were bouncing in prefect sync with Luke's thrusting. Cecilia figured that Marion wouldn't be able to speak in the morning and that she herself would probably be hard of hearing. Finally, Luke rolled Marion back on her back, this time in the traditional missionary position, was now making full thrust, deep into Marion. She had recovered just enough so that she could kiss Luke as he thrust and could even urge him to fill her up. Of course, she paid no attention to how loud she was yelling but neither of them cared by this point, and for that matter neither did Cecilia for she was now having almost constant orgasms from fingering herself while smelling, watching, and listening to Marion and Luke. Marion knew that Luke was getting close when she felt his cock swell up even more. It got hotter still and his veins popped and gave Marion extra sensation. Then it happened, Luke exploded. Eight giant shots of hot cum were unloaded into Marion's pussy and this caused Marion to again cum so hard that she blacked out. As Luke gently pulled out of Marion, a mix of cum came flooding out of her pussy and all over their bedding. Just like their first time, Luke rolled over so that he was on his back, Marion crawled up, and put her head on his shoulder and a leg over one of his. Luke somehow managed to find a cover and pulling it over them fell asleep. This was actually Cecilia's best chance to kill Marion, but like the two love birds she too had passed out. To be continued in part 3, Based on a post by somethin fishy, for Sex Stories.

Sit back and relax but pay attention to my conversation with Gee Ranasinha. Gee lives in the Northeast part of France. As he puts it, his marketing experience goes back to the “days of dial-up internet and AOL CDs”. During our conversation Gee tells us how he progressed from working with film, (do you know what that is?), to now working with the most advanced digital and other technological systems.   He is the CEO of his own marketing company KEXINO. He talks a bit about what makes a good marketing firm and why some companies are more successful than others. He says, for example, that most companies do the same things as every other company. While labels and logos may be different, if you cover up the logos the messages and ways to provide them are the same. The successful firms have learned to distinguish themselves by being different in some manner. He practices what he preaches right down to the name of his company, KEXINO. He will tell us where the company name came from. You will see why I says he practices what he preaches.   Gee gives us a great history of a lot of marketing efforts and initiatives. If you are at all involved with working to make yourself or your company successful marketing wise, then what Gee has to say will be especially relevant to you. This is one of those episodes that is worth hearing more than once.     About the Guest:   Gee has been in marketing since the days of dial-up internet and AOL CDs. Today, he's the CEO of KEXINO, a marketing agency and behavioral science practice for small to medium-sized businesses. Over the past 17 years KEXINO has helped over 400 startups and small businesses in around 20 countries grow awareness, reputation, trust - and sales. A Fellow of the Chartered Institute Of Marketing, Gee is also Visiting Professor at two business schools, teaching Marketing and Behavioral Science to final-year MBA students. Outside of work Gee loves to cook, listens to music on a ridiculously expensive hi-fi, and plays jazz piano very badly.    Ways to connect with Gee:   KEXINO website:  https://kexino.com LinkedIn:  https://linkedin.com/in/ranasinha YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/c/Kexino Instagram:  https://instagram.com/wearekexino TikTok:  https://tiktok.com/@kexino Threads: https://www.threads.net/@wearekexino BlueSky:  https://bsky.app/profile/kexino.com     About the Host:   Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset .   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.       Transcription Notes:   Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:16 Well and a gracious hello to you, wherever you may be, you are now listening to an episode of unstoppable mindset. I am your host, Mike or Michael. I don't really care which hingson and our guest today is Gee Ranasinha, who is a person who is very heavily involved in doing marketing and so on. Gee has been marketing for a long time, and reading his bio, he talks about being in marketing since the days of dial up and AOL and CDs. I remember the first time I tried to subscribe to AOL. It was a floppy disk. But anyway, that's okay. The bottom line is that does go back many, many years. That's when we had Rs 232 cables and modems. Now people probably don't mostly know what they are unless they're technically involved and they're all built into the technology that we use. But that's another history lesson for later. So Gee, I want to welcome you to unstoppable mindset. We're really glad you're here. This should be a fun subject and thing to talk about.   Gee Ranasinha ** 02:27 Well, thank you very much for inviting me, Michael, I do. I do appreciate it.   Michael Hingson ** 02:31 Well, I'm looking forward to it and getting a chance to talk. And love to hear some of your your old stories about marketing, as well as the new ones, and of course, what lessons we learned from the old ones that helped in the new ones. And of course, I suspect there'll also be a lot of situations where we didn't learn the lessons that we should have, which is another story, right?   Gee Ranasinha ** 02:50 Yeah, history does tend to repeat itself, unfortunately, and   Michael Hingson ** 02:55 that usually happens because we don't pay attention to the lessons.   Gee Ranasinha ** 02:59 Yeah, yeah, we, we, I think we think we know better. But I mean, it's, it's, it's funny, because, you know, if you look at other other industries, you know, if, if you want to be an architect, right, you would certainly look back to the works of, you know, Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright or Renzo Piano, or, you know, some of the great architects, and you would look back on their work, look how they did it. And you would, you know, turn back the the annals of history to to see what had gone before. But for some reason, in our industry, in marketing, we we don't think we can learn from the lessons that our erstwhile peers have had in the past, and we've so as a result, we tend to sort of rename things that have gone before, so that the newer generation of marketers will actually pay attention to them. So we give things new names. But actually, if you, if you scratch the surface and look a little bit deeper. It's actually nothing new at all. And I don't quite know why that is. I think people think that they know better than the people who've gone before them, because of the technology, because you know so much of the execution the promotion side of marketing is technology based. They I'm guessing that people don't see a relevance to what happened in the past because of the technology aspect being different, right? But what I contend is that the the essence. Of marketing is about understanding human behavior and their reactions to particular inputs, impulses, right? Um, in which case, we have plenty to learn from the people who've you know, who've walked in our in the walk this path before, and we should be a little bit, maybe a little bit more humble and open minded into accepting that we don't know everything, and we maybe don't even know what we don't know.   Michael Hingson ** 05:36 I always remember back in what was it, 1982 or 1983 we had a situation here in the United States where somebody planted some poison in a bottle of Tylenol in a drug store. I remember that, yeah, and within a day, the president of the company came out and said, This is what we're going to do to deal with it, including taking all the bottles of all the pills off the shelves until we check them over and make sure everyone is clean and so on. And he got right out in front of it. And I've seen so many examples since of relatively similar kinds of crises, and nobody takes a step to take a firm stand about how we're going to handle it, which is really strange, because clearly what he did really should have taught us all a lesson. Tylenol hasn't gone away, the company hasn't gone away, and the lesson should be that there is relevance in getting out in front of it and having a plan. Now I don't know whether he or anyone really had a plan in case something happened. I've never heard that, but still whatever he got right out in front of it and addressed it. And I just really wish more marketing people, when there is a crisis, would do more of that to instill confidence in consumers.   Gee Ranasinha ** 07:07 He did the right thing, right? He did, he did what you or I would have done, or we would like to think we would have done in this place, right? I, I'm, I'm guessing it was probably, not the favorite course of action, if this had been debated at board stroke shareholder level. But like I said, he he did what we all think we would have done in his place. He did the right thing. And I think that there are many instances today, more instances today than maybe in the past, where the actions of an individual they are. An individual has more freedom of expression in the past than they've had in the in the present, and they don't have to mind their P's and Q's as much. I mean, sure we know we're still talking about profit making organizations. You know, we're living in a pseudo capitalist, Neo liberal society. But surely we're still there still needs to be some kind of humanity at the end of this, right? You know, reputations take years, decades, sometimes, to build, and they can be knocked down very quickly, right, right? There's so I think some somebody, somebody, somebody a lot older and wiser than me, well, certainly wiser older. Said a brand's reputation was like a tree. It takes ages to grow, but can be knocked down very quickly, and there are plenty. You know, history is littered with examples of of organizations who haven't done the right thing.   Speaker 1 ** 09:16 Well, the Yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead. Tell me   Michael Hingson ** 09:20 the I observed this actually not too long ago, on a podcast, this whole discussion to someone, and they made an interesting point, which I think is probably relevant, which is, today we have a different environment, because we have social media. We have so many things, where communications go so quickly, and we we see so many people putting out information right or wrong, conspiracy or not, about anything and everything that comes up, that it causes people maybe to hesitate a little bit more to. Truly study what they want to say, because everyone's going to pick up on it. But at the same time, and I appreciate that at the same time, I think there are basic marketing principles. And as you point out, and as you're well aware, there is such a thing as human behavior, and while people want instant gratification, and they want to know right now what happened 20 minutes ago. The reality is we're not necessarily going to get that. The media doesn't help because they want to put everything out and get the story. But still, the reality is human nature is human nature, and ultimately, Truth will win out. And what we need to do is to really work more toward making sure that that happens.   Gee Ranasinha ** 10:48 I, I actually don't agree with that. Okay, in in, you know, in the, in the with the greatest respect, firstly, I think, I think as a cop out to use social media, information channels, news cycles, that sort of thing, because, if anything, because of the pace of the news cycle and The, you know, the fire hose of social media today, me, we're in a better position to say what we mean and not regret it, because it's forgotten it 20 minutes. Yeah, so it works, it's, it's an argument for what we're talking about not, not against   Michael Hingson ** 11:41 it, yeah. I agree. Yeah, go ahead,   Gee Ranasinha ** 11:45 yeah. And the second thing you said, truth will out. And I think truth does not without and there are plenty of people who continue to spout out misinformation and disinformation, yeah, constantly at every level of corporate at a corporate level, at a political level, at a geopolitical level, or at a local level, right? I don't want to sort of go down that rabbit hole, right, but there are, there are plenty of misquotes, myths, truths, which are never, never withdrawn and never counted, never excused and live out there in the ether, in perpetuity.   Michael Hingson ** 12:35 Yeah, it's true, but I also think that in the end, while some people continue to put their inaccurate information out, I think there are also others who have taken the time, or do take the time they put out more relevant information, and probably in the long run, more people buy into that than to misinformation. I'm not going to say it's a perfect world, but I think more often than not, enough positive information comes out that people eventually get more of the right answer than all the yammering and bad information. But it may take time.   Gee Ranasinha ** 13:18 I would love to believe that, Mike, I really would maybe I'm just too cynical, right?   Michael Hingson ** 13:27 I hear you, I hear you, and you know, I don't know I could be just as wrong. I mean, in the United States today, we've got a government with people who are definitely talking about things and saying things that most of us have always felt are untrue, but unfortunately, they're being said and pushed in such a way that more people are not opposing them. And how quickly that will change remains to be seen. And for all I know, and I think, for all I know, maybe some of what they're saying might be right, but we'll see.   Gee Ranasinha ** 14:05 I think that's the issue. I mean, I, as I said, I don't really want to jump down that politics rabbit hole, but no, not really. I think, you know, the issue is, if you say a lie enough times, people believe it. Yeah, right, yeah. And the fact that nobody's fact checking this stuff, I'm like, I said. I'm not. I'm not singling out politics. I'm singling out messaging in its widest in its widest interpretation, right, false messaging of any sort, if left unchecked. Yeah. Correct. I think the people who know an alternative reality or know that it's a lie know that it's an untruth by not publicly facts checking it, by not calling these. People out are complicit in spreading the lie.   Michael Hingson ** 15:03 Yeah, well, I think that's true, and you're right. It doesn't matter whether it's politics. It doesn't matter whether it's well, whatever it is, it's anything. And I think there's one of the beauties of of our country, your country. And I didn't explain at the beginning that G is in the you said, northwest part of France, right? Northeast, northeast, well, east, west, northeast part   Gee Ranasinha ** 15:29 of Yeah, well, near enough, you know, if you go, if you go, if you go east, far enough times you get, you get to West Anyway, don't you? Well, you get back where you started. Or maybe you don't, I don't know if, depends who you listen   Michael Hingson ** 15:39 to, right? If the Earth is flat. Well, even the Flat Earthers have had explanations for why the earth is flat and people don't fall off, but that's okay, but yeah, so northeast part of France and and I hear, I hear what you're saying, and I think it's important that people have the freedom to be able to fact check, and I, and I hope, as we grow more people will find the value of that, but that in all aspects, but that remains to be seen.   Gee Ranasinha ** 16:14 Well, I think especially in you know, perversely, now that we have the ability to check the veracity of a piece of information a lot easier, right? Almost in real time. Yeah. I think the fact that we can means that we don't, you know, you probably know the quote by what was his name? Edwin Burke, who may or may not have said that, you know, evil triumphs when good men do nothing or something like that. Along that sort of lines, some people say that he didn't say that. He did say, it doesn't matter who said it, right? It's a great quote. It's a great quote. It's a great quote. And that's what I mean about being complicit, just by the fact of not calling this stuff out, feeds the fire. Yeah, to the to the point where it becomes and especially, I'm talking with people who maybe are a little bit younger and haven't and are more likely to believe what they see on screens of whatever size, simply because it's in the public domain, um, whereas The older strokes more cynical of us may may question a lot more of what's thrown in front of our eyes. So I think all of us have a responsibility, which I don't think all of us understand the power that we yield or we're afraid to or afraid to? Yeah, absolutely.   Michael Hingson ** 18:08 So tell me a little about kind of the early Gee growing up and so on, and how you got into this whole idea and arena of marketing and so on.   Gee Ranasinha ** 18:18 Well before this, I was the CMO of a software company. I was there for seven years, and before that, I was working for a company in London, working with in the print and publishing industries. So I've been around media for most of my working life, and after, after being at the software company for seven years, sort of hit a little bit of a ceiling, really. I mean, the company was a small company, and it could only grow at a certain rate, and so I wasn't really being challenged anymore. I had to wait a little bit until the company could fill the bigger shoes that had been given, if you like. You know, I mean growing pains. It's very common for companies of all sizes to go through this sort of thing. So to be honest, I probably was treading water a bit too long. But you know, you get you get complacent, don't you, you get comfortable in in the, you know the corporate job, and you know a salary at the at the end of every month, and you know corporate travel and company BMWs and expense accounts and all of that sort of trappings. And you know, I, I fell for all of that. You. Um, but I finally realized that something needed to happen. So at the end of 2007 beginning of 2008 Me and a couple of colleagues decided to start the agency, which, as you will remember, 2008 was not exactly the best time to start a marketing agency. Good time to start any agency,   Michael Hingson ** 20:29 to be honest. The other hand, there were a lot of opportunities. But yeah, I hear you. Well, yeah,   Gee Ranasinha ** 20:34 glass half full. Glass half empty, right? Yeah. But you know, luckily, with with a number of very, very supportive clients in those early days, you know, we weathered the post recession? Yeah, slow down. And 17 and a half years later, here we are. We've now. We started off with three. We were three. We're now 19. We're in nine countries. Nine of us were in the US. The rest are in Europe, South Africa, Japan, and two people in Australia. That's that, that's, that's who we are. So, you know, we're a a team of marketing, creative and business development specialists, and we work with startups and small businesses primarily in the US, even though we're based all over the place, and we combine marketing strategy, proper strategy, with a thing called behavioral science, which works with organizations to increase their awareness, their reputation, their trust, and most of all, of course, sales Right? Because sales is name of the game. Sales is what it's all about. So yeah, I'd say probably 80, 90% of our clients are in the US and, well, certainly North America anyway, and it's all sorts of industries, all sorts of sizes. We've we've got, we certainly had in the past. You know, solopreneur type businesses, small businesses and larger businesses, up to around 40 to 50 mil to revenue that sort of size, anything bigger they usually have, usually got, you know, quite well, working teams within the organization. So we're, you know, the amount of effective contribution that we can add to that is, it's obviously going to be as a percentage, much lower. So it's, it's, it's really for that, that smaller sized profile of organization, and it's not sort of limited by particular industry or category. We've, you know, we work with all sorts. We've worked in sports, healthcare, FinTech, medical, professional services, software, publishing, all sorts, right across the board.   Michael Hingson ** 23:34 What got you started in marketing in the beginning, you you know you were like everyone else. You were a kid and you grew up and so on. What? What really made you decide that this was the kind of career you wanted?   Gee Ranasinha ** 23:46 Marketing wasn't my first career. I've had a few others in the past. I actually started off my first first company, and I founded, way back when was a media production company. I was a professional photographer, advertising photographer, working with advertising agencies as well as direct corporate commissions. This is in the days of film. This was way before digital image capture.   Michael Hingson ** 24:20 So this is going back to what the 1980s   Gee Ranasinha ** 24:23 it's going to late 80s to early 90s. Yeah, and I was working with eight by 10 and four by five view cameras, sometimes called plate cameras. It was mainly studio stuff. I was happier in the studio that we did location stuff as well. But studio was where I was happiest because I could control everything. I suppose I'm on control freak at the end of the day. So I can control every highlight, every nuance, every every part of the equation. And. And and that's where I started. And then after doing that for a while, I came I got involved with professional quality digital image capture. Is very, very it is very, very beginning. And was instrumental in the the adoption of digital image capture for larger print and publishing catalog fashion houses who were looking for a way to streamline that production process, where, obviously, up until then, the processing of film had been a bottleneck, right? You couldn't, you couldn't process film any quicker than the film needed to be processed, right the the e6 process, which was the the term for using a bunch of chemicals to create slides, die, positives, transparencies. I think it used to take like 36 minutes plus drying time. So there was a, you know, close to an hour wait between shooting and actually seeing what what the result was. And that time frame could not be reduced up until that point in time, the quality of digital image capture systems wasn't really all of that, certainly wasn't a close approximation to what you could get with with film at The time, until a number of manufacturers working with chip manufacturers, were able to increase the dynamic range and the the total nuances that you could capture on digital Of course, the problem at that time was we were talking about what, what were, What today is not particularly large, but was at the time in terms of file sizes, and the computers of the day would be struggling to deal with images of that high quality, so It was always a game of catch up between the image capture hardware and the computer hardware needed to to view and manipulate the image and by manipulate it was more more manipulation in terms of optimizing the digital file for reproduction in print, because obviously that was the primary carrier of, yeah, of the information. It was for use in some kind of printed medium. It wasn't like we were doing very much with with email or websites or anything else in the in the early 90s. So the conversion process to optimize a digital image captured file, to give the best possible tonal reproduction on printed material has always been a little bit of a black art, even when we when we were digitizing transparency films, going to digital image capture made things a lot more predictable, but it also increased the computational power needed, number one, but also for photographers to actually understand a little bit more about the photo mechanical print process, and there were very few photographers who understood both, both sides of the fence. So I spent a lot of time being a pom pom girl. Basically Mike. I was, I was, I was waving the pom poms and preaching large about the benefits of digital image capture and how and educating the industries, various in photographic industries, about, you know, possible best practices. There weren't any sort of standards in place at the time,   Michael Hingson ** 29:41 and it took a while for people to really buy into that they weren't visionary enough to understand what you were saying. I bet   Gee Ranasinha ** 29:48 Well, we were also taught very few were enough, and there were two reasons. One of them was financially based, because. We were talking about a ton of money, yeah, to do this properly, we were talking about a ton of money. Just the image capture system would easily cost you 50 grand. And this, you know this, this was in the days when 50 grand was a lot of money,   Michael Hingson ** 30:18 yeah, well, I remember my first jobs out of college were working with Ray Kurzweil, who developed Omni font, optical character recognition system. Oh, my goodness me, I did not know that. And the first machine that he put out for general use, called the Kurzweil data entry machine, was only $125,000 it worked. It still took a while to make it to truly do what it needed to do, but still it was. It was the first machine, and a lot of people just didn't buy into it. It took a while to get people to see the value of why digitizing printed material was so relevant, some lawyers, Some law firms, some banks and so on, caught on, and as people realized what it would do, then they got interested. But yeah, it was very expensive,   Gee Ranasinha ** 31:14 very expensive. And I think the other reason for the reticence is just nature, to be honest. Mike, I mean, you know, as as people, as human beings, most of us are averse to change, right? Because change is an unknown, and we don't like unknowns. We like predictability. We like knowing that when we get up in the morning, the sun's gonna come up and we're gonna go through our our usual routine, and so when something comes along that up ends the status quo to the point where we need to come up with adopting new behaviors that's very uncomfortable for many people. And you know, the adoption of digitization in, you know, any industry, I think, in everybody who's worked in any particular industry has has plenty of anecdotal evidence to show how people would consciously or unconsciously dragging their feet to adopt that change because they were happier doing stuff that they knew,   Michael Hingson ** 32:32 who went out of their comfort zone, right?   Gee Ranasinha ** 32:35 Absolutely, it's natural, it's, it's, it's who we are as as as human beings, who most of us are as human beings with, obviously, we're talking about the middle of the bell curve here. I mean, there are plenty of wackos on either side just go out and do stuff, right? And, you know those, you know, some of those get, you know, locked up with in straight jackets. But the other ones tend to, sort of, you know, create true innovation and push things forward.   Michael Hingson ** 33:04 Steve Jobs, even Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, good examples of some of the people who did things that most people didn't think could be done.   Gee Ranasinha ** 33:18 You know, the true innovation always happens at the periphery, but we tend to over emphasize the median. We know we try to make averages of everything, yeah, but averages aren't what moves the needle, right? No. And you know Britain, you know, for even for marketing, obviously, that's very much, very, very much my sort of thing. Um, most organizations, most business owners, certainly most marketing managers, find comfort in in executing their marketing in ways in which they are comfortable, in ways which are somewhat expected within the industry. But the problem is, it doesn't get you noticed. It doesn't get you attention. If you're in the middle, right? You know the worst, the worst place to walk on the in the street is in the middle of the road right, pick a side, but don't walk in the middle.   34:27 Not a good idea yet.   Gee Ranasinha ** 34:30 That's our our job is to is to, number one, generate attention, because there's no way we can communicate a message unless we have someone's attention. Everything starts from the attention side of things. Now there are very, you know, various ways that we can attract attention, but attention needs to come and needs to come from somewhere. And you know the definite. Of creating attention is to to create some kind of visual, audio, or combination of the two, experience which is somewhat outside of the norm, and create some kind of emotional response that our brains want to pay attention to, right? Want to notice? Because if you're not noticed, then there's no it doesn't matter how great your product is, doesn't matter how wonderful your customer service is, or it's available in 27 colors, or it's free delivery, or what you know, all the rest of it doesn't matter, because you know, unless people know who you are, what you do, who it's for, and why they should give a crap, then you know anything else you do after that Time is is moot, is irrelevant.   Michael Hingson ** 36:00 I read an interesting email this morning from someone who was talking about why speakers don't tend to be as successful as they should be. And this person talked about you could have the greatest speech in the world. You could be   Michael Hingson ** 36:17 talking and getting standing ovations and so on, but you're not getting a lot of speaking engagements, and his comment was the reason you're not is that your talk isn't necessarily relevant. I thought that was interesting. I think there's some things to be said for relevance, but I think it's also that you're not helping to get people to think and realize that being different and getting people to think and value that is more important than we tend to want to recognize as well.   Gee Ranasinha ** 36:59 I would, I would, I would wholeheartedly agree relevance is a very important component. But, you know, I maintain that it starts with attention. Yeah, relevance, I think, within the speaking world, I yes, there's so much we can do with relevance by by coming at a subject matter topic from a totally different perspective. Yeah, right. You know, just because you have the same message as 100 other competitors doesn't mean they have to say something in the same way, right? And so even if the core message is similar, the way that we choose to present that can be, you know, 100 101 different ways. And I think that is something that we forget, and I think that's one of the reasons why so much of the marketing that we see today is ignored. Yeah, you know, there's a there's a marketing Well, I wouldn't say the marketing model. There's a communication model, okay? Sales model actually called Ada, Ida, a, I D, A, okay. So even if you've not, not worked in sales or marketing at all, if you've even seen the film Glengarry Glynn Ross, or the play that it was based on. It's actually playing in New York City at the moment. I believe, yeah, a, I D, A, which is tracking the customer experience in four steps. So the idea is you have awareness, interest, desire and action, right? A, I, D, A, and it's understanding that there are four steps to getting to the position of negotiating the deal with a prospective buyer, but number one starts with awareness. You know they need, they need to be aware that you exist and nobody's going to buy from you if they don't know who you are. They need to know who they need to know who you are before they'll buy from you. Right then obviously needs to be an interest a product market fit what you're selling is something that they could conceivably use in terms of solving a particular problem that they perceive as having the desire. Why should they buy from you, as opposed to somebody else? Why do they. Need to buy your product, as opposed to a competitive product, and then finally, action, right? So that's what we might call sales, activation or performance marketing, or, you know, sales in the old terms, right? As they would say in that film, it's getting the getting the buyer to sign on the line that is dotted. But all of this stuff starts with attention and when we're not doing a very good job, I think as a mark, as an industry, we used to be really good at it, but I think we've taken our eye off the ball somewhat, and hoped that technology would fill in the gaps of our incompetence at being able to, excuse me, being able to shape the way that we market to customers, to buyers, in ways which create the memory structures in the brain to a sufficiently acute level so that when they are in The position to buy something, they think of us, as well as probably a number a handful of other suitors that solve their problem. And this is why, I think this is the reason why, because of the over reliance of technology, I mean, this is the reason why so much of our marketing fails to generate interest, sales to generate the tangible business results that are expected of it. Because we're, we're marketing by bullet point. We're expecting buyers to buy off a fact sheet. We've, we've exercised the creativity out of the equation. And we're and, and we were just producing this vacuous, generic vanilla   Michael Hingson ** 42:12 musach, yeah, if you   Gee Ranasinha ** 42:14 like, Okay, I mean, again, you know, think of any particular industry, you can see this. It's pretty much endemic. You can have two totally different organizations selling something purportedly solving the same problem. And you can look at two pieces of you can look at a piece of marketing from each company. And if you covered up the logo of each person of each company's marketing output, 10 will get you five that what's actually contained in the messaging is as equally valid for company A as it is for Company B, and that's a real problem.   Michael Hingson ** 43:00 It's not getting anyone's attention or creating awareness.   Gee Ranasinha ** 43:03 It's not creating attention or awareness. And worse, it's creating a level of confusion in the buyer's mind. Because we're we're looking for comparisons, we're looking at a way to make an educated decision compared to something else, and if we can't see why product A is miles ahead in our minds of Company B or product B, what often happens is rather than make a wrong decision, because we can't clearly differentiate the pros and cons between the two products, what we end up doing is nothing. We walk away. We don't buy anything, because we can't see a clear winner, which impacts company A and company B, if not the entire industry. And then they turn around and say, Oh, well, nobody's buying. Why? Why? Why is our industry lagging behind so many others? It's because we're just on autopilot, creating this, this nonsense, this generic sea of sameness in terms of communication, which we just don't seem to have a grip on the fundamental understanding of how people buy stuff anymore. We used to Yeah, up and up and up until probably the 90s. We used to know all this stuff. We used to know how get people going, how to stand out, how to create differentiated messaging, how to understand. Or what levers we could pull to better invoke an emotional reaction in the minds of the target buying audience that we're looking to attract. And then for some for, you know the if we plotted these things around two curves, you know, the point at which these curves would cross would probably be the adoption of technology,   Michael Hingson ** 45:29 whereas we came to reproduce the same thing in different ways, but you're still producing the same thing. The technology has limited our imagination, and we don't use re imaginations the way we used to.   Gee Ranasinha ** 45:43 We we've we're using, we're using technology as a proxy for reach. And getting in front of 1000 eyeballs or a million eyeballs or 100 million eyeballs doesn't necessarily mean any of those eyeballs are fit in the ideal customer profile we're looking to attract. Right? More doesn't mean better, and what what we're doing is we're trying to use technology to to fill in the gaps, but technology doesn't understand stuff like human emotion, right, and buying drivers and contextual messaging, right? Because all of this stuff human behavior is totally contextual, right? I will, I will come up with a and I'm sure you're the same thing. You will have a particular point of view about something one day and the next, the very next day, or even the very next hour, you could have a totally different viewpoint on a particular topic, maybe because you've had more information, or just maybe for the for the hell of it, right? We know we are we are not logical, rational, pragmatic machines that always choose the best in inverted commas solution to our issue.   Michael Hingson ** 47:23 Do you think AI will help any of this?   Gee Ranasinha ** 47:29 I think AI will help in terms of the fact that it will show how little we know about human behavior, and so will force forward thinking, innovative marketers to understand the only thing that matters, which is what's going on between the ears of the people we're trying to attract. I think AI is already showing us what we don't know, not what we know,   Michael Hingson ** 48:04 right? And it's still going to be up to us to do something about that and use AI as a tool to help possibly create some of what needs to be done. But it still requires our thought processes ultimately, to make that happen,   Gee Ranasinha ** 48:23 AI can't create. All AI can do is remix what has already been in existence, right? Ai doesn't create what AI does. The thing is, we're using AI for the wrong stuff. AI is really good at a ton of things, and it sucks big time at a load of other things. But for some reason, we want to throw all our efforts in trying to make it better at the things it's not good at, rather than use it at the things that it's really, really good   Michael Hingson ** 49:04 at, such as,   Gee Ranasinha ** 49:08 such as interpreting large data sets, Creating models of financial models, marketing models, marketing matrix, matrices, spotting, spotting trends in data, large, huge, like huge models of data, which no human being could really, in reality, Make any head in the tail of finding underlying commonalities in in the data to be able to create from that, to be able to draw out real, useful insights on that data to create new. New messaging, innovative products, services that we haven't thought of before because we haven't been able to see the wood for the trees,   50:13 if you like, yeah, right   Gee Ranasinha ** 50:17 for that sort of stuff, for the grunt work, for the automation. You know, do this, then do this, and all of that sort of stuff, A, B, testing, programmatic stuff, all of that stuff, banner ads and, you know, modifying banner all of that stuff is just basic grunt work that nobody needs, needs to do, wants to do, right? Give it all to AI it. Most AI is doing it, most of it anyway. We just never called it AI. You know, we've been doing it for 25 years. We just called it software in those days, right? But it's the same. It's the same goddamn thing. Is what we were doing, right? Let it do all of that stuff, because it's far better. And let's focus on the stuff that it can't do. Let's find out about what levers we need to pull at an emotional level to create messaging that better resonates in the minds of our buyers. That's what we need to do. Ai can't do that stuff right.   Michael Hingson ** 51:16 Where I think AI is is helpful today, as opposed to just software in the past, is that it has been taught how better to interact with those who use it, to be able to take questions and do more with it, with them than it used to be able to do, but we still have to come up with the problems or the issues that we wanted to solve, and to do it right, we have to give it a fair amount of information which, which still means we've got to be deeply involved in the process.   Gee Ranasinha ** 51:53 I mean, where it's great. I mean, if we're looking at, you know, Text, type, work, right, right, or I, or ideas or possibilities, or actually understanding the wider consideration set of a particular problem is that the hardest thing is, when you're staring at a blank piece of paper, isn't it? Right? We don't need that's the hardest thing, right? So we don't need to stare at a blank sheet anymore with a flashing cursor, right? You know, we can engage in a pseudo conversation that we need to take into consideration that this conversation is taking place based upon previous, existing ideas. So the chance that we'll get something fresh and original is very, very small. And as you just mentioned, you know, the quality of the prompt is everything. Get the prompt wrong and without enough granularity, details, specificity, whatever else you get just a huge piece of crap, don't you? Right? So in other words, having a better understanding of how we as humans make decisions actually improves our prompting ability, right, right?   Michael Hingson ** 53:12 And I think AI, it is not creative, but I think that AI can spew is probably the wrong word, but AI can put out things that, if we think about it, will cause us to do the creating that we want, but it's still going to be assets involved in doing that.   Gee Ranasinha ** 53:35 The problem is, and what we're seeing, certainly in the last couple of months, maybe even longer, maybe I just haven't noticed. It is just we were, you know, there's this old saying, you know, just because you can doesn't mean you should, right? I just see an absolute tsunami of vacuous, generic nonsense being spouted out across all types of channels, digital and otherwise, but mainly digital, all of it AI generated. Sometimes it's images, sometimes it's videos, sometimes it's both, sometimes it's text, whatever. But we we're adding to the noise instead of adding to the signal. So the inevitable result of all of this is going to be numbness. We're going to becoming different to marketing of all sorts, the good stuff as well as the bad. You're going to be it's we're just gonna get numb. So it's going to make the attention stuff. That's why I've been banging on about attention all this time, right? It's gonna, it's, yeah, there's, see, there is a method to my madness here. So the the point is that creation and maintaining. Attention is going to be even harder than it would have been before. Yeah, and, and we, you know, we're getting to the point where, you know, you've got agentic AI, where you've got agents talking to other agents and going around in this feedback loop. But we're not, we're not, we're not creating any emotional engagement from a, from a from a buyer perspective, from a user perspective, yes, it all looks great. And as a, as an exercise in technology, it's fantastic. So wonderful, right? But how has it increased sales? That's what I want to know has has it reduced or altered the cost of acquiring a customer and maintaining that customer relationship, because that's where the rubber hits the road. That's all that matters. I don't care whether it's a technological masterpiece, right, but if it hasn't sold anything, and actual sales, I'm not talking about likes and comments and retweets and all of that crap, because that's vanity metrics. Is nonsense   Michael Hingson ** 56:11 signing a contract. It's, you know,   Gee Ranasinha ** 56:16 there needs to be as an exchange of money at some point in time. Yeah, right. Is that happening? And I contend that it's not. And I think there are loads of people, loads of business owners, who are throwing money at this in the vain hope they you know that basically they're playing the numbers. They just need one horse to come in, 100 to one to be able to justify what they've spent on all of this stuff, right? Yeah, but I think those odds are getting longer and longer as each month goes, yeah. Well, you I think there's going to be an inevitable backlash back to stuff that actually resonates with people at a human level, at an emotional level, a psychological level, it has to   Michael Hingson ** 57:08 you started your marketing company 17 and a half years ago, caxino. Where'd that name come from?   Gee Ranasinha ** 57:18 From nothing? Okay, it doesn't mean anything I needed. I needed to have something which number one, that the domain was available. Of course, I needed to have something which was short, something that didn't mean, you know, something incongruous in another language and and so after a lot of to ing and fro ing, there were two schools of thought. At the beginning, we didn't know whether to go with something abstract, like caxino or something which was, you know, based based upon the the butting up of two existing words you know, like you see, you know, so many times, you know, big red table, or, you know, whatever. So we did, we decided to go with something abstract, so that we weren't encumbered by language.   Michael Hingson ** 58:22 You practiced what you preach pretty much. You're different, yeah, but why don't you call it? You don't refer to it as a digital marketing agency. Why is that?   Gee Ranasinha ** 58:34 No, I don't see us as a digital marketing agency, because digital marketing is not all we do. And not only that, I think, Well, I think there's, there's a number of reasons. Number one, I think we're using the word digital is, is a curveball. Firstly, because everything that we do is digital, right? Everything is already digital. Print is digital, TV is digital, billboards are digital. So saying digital is like saying electrical, electrical marketing agency, it makes as much sense to be honest. So that's number one. But I think the bigger issue is that by categorizing a marketing agency as being a digital marketing agency does a disservice to its work and indeed its outlook, because The object is not to be digital in your marketing, it's to do marketing in a digital world, which are two very different positions, okay? Because digital, the way that we're talking about it, is not a attributive noun, and it's certainly not an adjective. You. In the context that we're talking about it, digital is a channel. It's simply one way of getting in front of our audience. But it's not the only way of getting in front of our audience. Okay? So, yeah, along with many other reputable agencies, we happen to use the most appropriate channel of communication that makes sense to address a particular target audience group, and that's it. Okay, if that's digital, great. If that's walking down the street with an A frame with something written on the front of it, that's also great, okay, but it's, it's, it's not about it's not about the channel. It's about you being in the places where our target target audience group expects us to be. And so that's why I don't think of us as a digital marketing agency, because digital is only part of what we do, right? And we do many other things. And also, I think it puts it, it puts blinkers on things right? Because if you know, supposing, supposing you go to a Facebook marketing agency, of which there are many. Now, if you go to a Facebook marketing agency and you say, Okay, I want to do some ads. Where should I advertise? What are they going to tell you? Right, maybe Facebook, right? So there's, there's a thing called Maslow's hammer. Okay, in Maslow, as in the hierarchy, the Hierarchy of Needs Maslow. Okay to say, Maslow. He came up with this idea of Maslow's hammer. It's also known as the law of the instrument. And basically what it means, we can distill it down, is, if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail, okay? And what that means is, you're looking to solve any problem that comes along by the tools that you have in your toolbox, regardless of whether that's the best way of moving forward, which I think is a very short term and myopic view. So that's why we we don't like to think of ourselves as the marketing agency, because there are many other there are many ways of solving a particular problem, and it doesn't necessarily have to be   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:50 digital,   Gee Ranasinha ** 1:02:51 digital or promotional or, you know, it's, it's like, you know, are we a video marketing agency? No. Does that mean we don't do video, not at all. Of course, we do it, right? We're not an AI marketing agency, right? In the same way, okay, when we're not a we're not a YouTube marketing agency,   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:11 you're a marketing agency. We're a marketing agency, right? What are some of the biggest mistakes that small businesses make when it comes to marketing?   Gee Ranasinha ** 1:03:21 I think the single biggest mistake, and I speak to business owners pretty much on a daily basis, right? I think the single biggest issue that comes up again and again and again is something which I call self diagnosis, which is the business owner, approaches the marketing agency, or even digital marketing agency, approaches the marketing agency, and says, You know what, I need you to do this for me. Whatever that this is, okay. So you know, maybe it's some digital ads, maybe it's some videos, maybe it's a website, maybe it's a whatever. It doesn't matter what it is, but basically, the business owner is coming to us, coming to the marketing agency, dictating what the tactic is to be, which presumes a number of things, not least, that they think they have come to the conclusion that this particular tactic is going to solve their marketing problem based upon usually waving a wet finger in the air, yeah, or they've seen a YouTube video or something, okay, it's not based on any marketing knowledge experience or education, because, with the greatest respect, these people do not have any marketing knowledge experience. Into education, right? And why would they? Because they're running a business, right? They don't, you know, they it doesn't mean that they've had to do this marketing stuff. So they're, they're, they're presuming that a particular tactic is going to solve a business problem, a marketing tactic is going to solve a business problem. And so what what happens is the the particular tactic is is executed. Nothing changes revenue wise. And so the business owner says, well, that marketing agency was crap. Let's go to another marketing agency and ask them to do something else. So it's playing pin the tail on the donkey. Really, just trying stuff and hoping so. The point is that. The point is that if you're going to pay somebody who does this for a living, the idea that you know more than they do is already setting the relationship on a uneven kill, right? Yeah, you know, if I, if I go, if I go and see my doctor, and I say, and I wake up in the morning and I've got a pain in my chest, and I thinking, oh my goodness, I go and see the doctor, right? So on the way to the doctor's office, I do the worst thing possible, which is go on the internet and say, Okay, what does pain in my chest mean? Right? And I go into the doctor's office, and I sit down and I say, Okay, I've got a pain in my chest, doctor, that means I've got angina. Can you give me some heart medication, please? What's the doctor gonna tell you? Doctor's gonna tell you, shut the hell up. Yeah, I'm the doctor in the office. I'm the actually, where's, Where's, where's your medical degree doesn't exist, does it? No, and   Michael Hingson ** 1:07:00 just because you have a broken rib, we're not going to talk about that. Are we right?   Gee Ranasinha ** 1:07:04 So, What? What? So what's the doctor going to do? The doctor is going to ask you a bunch of questions, right? What did you do the last couple of days? Right? What did you eat? Did you go to the gym and over exert yourself? What's your history? Do you is there a history of heart disease in the family, you know, maybe there's is going to he or she is going to take some blood, maybe they're going to run a few other sort of tests. They're going to do a diagnosis, and at the end of this diagnosis, the doctor is going to come back to you and say, You know what? So, based upon all the questions that you've kindly answered, and based upon the blood work and all these other tests and scans we've done, it turns out that the the pain in your chest is nothing to do with angina. The reason you got a pain in the chest is because you had some spicy food last night. So you don't have you don't have Anjali, you have gas. Yeah, right, right, so I prescribe you a couple of packs of Tums. Yeah, sorted, right. And that's the point. The point is the doctor knows what he or she is doing, and you have to have confidence in that particular medical practitioner to diagnose the issue and prescribe a solution to that issue, right? Your job is not to say what you think is wrong with you at this stage of the conversation. Your job is to tell me where it hurts. That's it right now, I'll come back to you with a list of things which I think we need to do to move forward. Now you can go and get a second opinion, just like at a doctor's office. You may think I'm full of crap, which is absolutely your prerogative. Or you may say, I know better than you. I'm going to do my own thing, which, again, it's your time Absolutely. But if it all goes to crap, you can't turn around and say, well, if only this person had said this, or, you know, If only, if only, if only, and play the victim, because that's also just not going to wash. And I see this time and time and time again. You know, we've tried, well, we've tried a number of different agencies, and none of them have been able to help us. And then you sort of dig a bit deeper, and it's because they're never allowed to do what they're supposed to do, because they've always been second guessed. Yeah, that is probably the single biggest issue that I see coming up again and again and again with small business in market now, if and if it's a question of not having faith in that. Uh, agency, then you shouldn't have been employed. You shouldn't have that agency in the first place.   Michael Hingson ** 1:10:05 Get a second opinion.   Gee Ranasinha ** 1:10:07 You know, not all, not all agencies are great, just like not all plumbers are great. Not all mechanics are great. Same thing, right? It takes time to find the good ones, right? Um, but just because you found a bad one, because I don't know they were cheap, or they were local, or they were whatever, you know, whatever, whatever criteria you tend to use to base your decision upon, right? You can't, you can't criticize what they did if you didn't allow them to do what they were actually being paid to do.   Michael Hingson ** 1:10:47 Well, speaking of that, if people want to reach out to you, how do they do that?   Gee Ranasinha ** 1:10:53 Best way to get hold of me. Gee is on LinkedIn. I spend most of my time on LinkedIn. I post twice a week. I post videos about some of the sorts of things that we've been talking about today, and they're only sort of 60 seconds long, 90 seconds long. It's not sort of taking up anybody's time very much. You can find me there. Would you believe, Mike, there is only 1g runner scene on LinkedIn. Can you imagine fortuitous? How fortuitous is   Michael Hingson ** 1:11:27 that? Yeah, really, and G is spelled G, E, and how do you spell your last name?   Gee Ranasinha ** 1:11:33 You could eat. I'm sure all of this still, the stuff will be put in. It will, but I just figured it we could. But yeah. G, renasina, you can find me there. Otherwise, obviously you can find us on Kexino, k, e, X, I, N, o.com, which is the website, and there's plenty of information there textual information, there are videos, there are articles, there are all sorts of bits and pieces that you can find more about us   Michael Hingson ** 1:12:04 there. Well, this has been absolutely wonderful, and I really appreciate you taking more than an hour to chat with us today. And I hope this was fun, and I hope that people will appreciate it and will reach out to you and value what we've discussed. I think it's been great love to hear from all of you out there. Please feel free to email me. Michael H, i@accessibe.com so that's m, I, C, H, A, E, L, H, I at A, C, C, E, S, S, i, b, e.com, and love to hear from you wherever you're listening. Please give us a five star rating. We value those ratings very highly, and we'd love to to to hear and see you rate us and get your thoughts. If you know of anyone else who might be a good guest for unstoppable mindset. Gu as well, we'd sure appreciate your referring them to us. Introduce us. We're always looking for more people to to chat with, so please do that and again, gee, I just want to thank you one more time for being here. This has been great,   Gee Ranasinha ** 1:13:02 absolute pleasure, delighted to be invited.   Michael Hingson ** 1:13:10 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com . AccessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for Listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.

URSULA'S TOP STORIES: Mariners and Hawks win //Luke Duecy with the latest on Travis Decker // Charlie Harger love sports on the radio and the voices behind them // WE NEED TO TALK! Gee's terrible trip to the grocery store  

URSULA'S TOP STORIES: Mariners in the playoffs! // Kimmel returns // Richard Sherman defers 2nd DUI // Our listeners respond to Gee's post about people on the autism spectrum // WE NEED TO TALK about Spirit Air

Operaspymaster you may ask? Read on and listen to this episode. In this powerful and multifaceted episode of Unstoppable Mindset, we welcome Kay Sparling, former opera singer, PTSD survivor, and now debut novelist—as she shares her incredible life journey from international stages to the shadowy world of espionage fiction. Kay talks about the creation of her first novel, Mission Thaw, a gripping spy thriller based on her own real-life experiences volunteering with refugees in post-Cold War Europe. Kay and Michael discuss the inspiration behind her protagonist, CIA agent Caitlin Stewart, and how real-world trauma and service led Kay to use fiction as both a vehicle for healing and a call to action on the modern crisis of human trafficking. This is a conversation that transcends genres—music, espionage, activism, and resilience—all converging through the unstoppable spirit of a woman who refuses to stay silent. About the Guest: Kay Sparling was raised in the Midwest. At the age of seven, she began her professional singing career as Gretl in “The Sound of Music” and she continued to perform through high school. After graduation Kay attended University of Kansas and earned a BME in music education and a minor in Vocal Performance. She then attended graduate school in opera voice performance for one year at UMKC Conservatory of Music. She was awarded a grant to finish my graduate studies in Vienna, Austria. From there she won an apprenticeship at the Vienna State Opera. After moving to NYC to complete her second apprenticeship, Kay lived in Germany, Austria, and Italy for many years. In 1999 Kay returned to NYC and continued singing opera and became a cantor for the NYC diocese. After 9/11, she served as a cantor at many of the funeral and memorial masses for the fallen first responders. In 2003, Kay moved from NYC to the upper Midwest and started a conservatory of Music and Theatre where her voice students have been awarded numerous prestigious scholarships and won many competitions. In 2020, the pandemic shut down her conservatory, so she began training to be a legal assistant and now works in workers compensation. Back in 2013, Kay had started writing a journal as a PTSD treatment. She was encouraged to extend the material into a novel. After much training and several drafts, Mission Thaw was published in 2024. Kay is currently writing the second book in the Kaitlyn Stewart Spy Thriller Series. Ways to connect with Kay: Website: https://www.kaysparlingbooks.com X: https://x.com/MissionThaw/missionthaw/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/missionthaw.bsky.social Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/505674375416879 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kay-sparling-8516b638/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/missionthaw/ Litsy: https://www.litsy.com/web/user/Mission%20Thaw About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset . Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes: Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:16 Well, hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of unstoppable mindset. I'm your host, Mike hingson, and our guest today is a very fascinating individual. I was just teasing her a little bit about her email address, which is operaspy master@gmail.com I'm telling you, don't cross her. That's all I gotta say. Anyway, we'll, we'll get into all of that. But I really am glad that she is with us. Kay Sparling is a fascinating woman who's had an interesting career. She's written, she's done a number of things. She's used to be an opera, gosh, all sorts of stuff. So anyway, we'll get to all of it and we'll talk about it. I don't want to give it all away. Where would the fun in that be? Kay, welcome to unstoppable mindset.   Kay Sparling ** 02:11 Well, thank you. I'm glad to be here. Well,   Michael Hingson ** 02:13 we're glad you're here. You're from up in Wisconsin. We were going to do this a couple of weeks ago, but you had all the storms, and it stole your internet and your power away, didn't   Kay Sparling ** 02:23 it? It sure did. Yeah, that was a terrible storm we had.   Michael Hingson ** 02:28 Yeah, that's kind of no fun. I remember years ago, I was talking to somebody on the phone. We were doing a sales call, and he said, I might not be able to stay on the phone because we're having a really serious storm, and he said it is possible that the lightning could hit the phone lines, and if it does, it could come in the house. And we talked for a few minutes, and then he said, I'm going to have to hang up, because I just felt a small shock, because the lightning obviously hit the phone line, so we'll have to talk later. And and he was gone. And we did talk later, though he was okay, but still, wow, yeah, there's a lot of crazy weather going on, isn't there? And we were just talking about the, we were just talking about the Canadian wildfires. They're No fun.   Kay Sparling ** 03:15 No, no. Just everywhere is having crazy weather.   Michael Hingson ** 03:20 Well, tell us a little bit about you growing up and all that sort of stuff, and telling me about the the early K   Kay Sparling ** 03:32 Well, growing up, I grew up in a farm community in the in the central Midwest, just you know, right in the middle of the bread basket, you might say, not near where you are now. No no, no further south and in very much agriculture time, I mean skipping ahead. I remember talking to a famous opera conductor when I was an apprentice, and I made some reference, and he goes, Well, how would you know that? And I said, because I grew up on a farm. And he went, Oh, get out here. Nobody makes it, you know, to a major European opera house from a farm. And I went, Well, I did. And later, I asked my mom to send me a picture, because we had had an aerial view taken of our homestead, and it was obvious for miles, all the way around the house and the barn and all, it was just corn fields and soybeans. You know what they showed   Michael Hingson ** 04:40 Illinois, Illinois, and so you showed it to him, yeah,   Kay Sparling ** 04:44 I showed it to him, and he was like, well, doggone, you're not lying. Like, No, I wasn't kidding you. I really did.   Michael Hingson ** 04:51 It shows how good I really am. See how far I progressed.   Kay Sparling ** 04:55 Well, you know, I was one of these kids. I. At five years old, I my parents took me to see sound and music at the theater, and during the intermission. Now I'm five years old, it's pretty late for me, right? But when we're in the concession stand, I tug at my mom's skirt, and I say, Mom, that's what I want to do. And she looks at me kind of funny, and she's kind of funny, and she's kind of confused. Well, what do you want to do work in a theater? You know, a movie theater? No, no, I want to do what those kids are doing on that on the movie screen. And she was like, Well, honey, you know, that's that's really hard to get somewhere like that. So that was when I was five. And then when I was seven, she just, you know, the all the school and the church were telling her, this kid's got a great voice, and they kept giving me solos and stuff. And so when I was seven, she put me in the Sangamon County Fair Little Miss competition. And of course, my talent was singing, so I just sang away. I really can't remember what I sang, but afterwards, a fellow came up to my parents and introduced himself, and he said that he was there, he had family, not, you know, in the area, and that he had grown up there, but since then, he he was in St Louis, and he said, we are, I'm a scout, and I'm looking, I'm an entertainment Scout, and I'm actually looking for, you know, the von trop children. We're going to do a big production, and we'd love to audition your daughter. Well, we were about, think it was an hour and a half away from St Louis, so my parents are like, wow, that'd be quite a commitment. But long story short, I did it, and that started my professional career. I was the youngest Bon Troy. You know, over cradle, yeah. And so it just went from there. And, you know, it was all Broadway, of course, and I did a lot of church singing, you know, it got to be by the time I was, you know, in high school, people were hiring me for weddings, funerals, all that kind of thing. And so I was a Broadway and sacred singer. Went to college. My parents said, you can't depend on a vocal performance degree. What if things don't work out? You have to have something fall back. So I went into vocal music ed at a very, very good school for that, and also music therapy, and, you know, continue being in their shows. And when I when I graduated, continued the Broadway, and one night I was also singing a little bit of jazz in Kansas City, where I was living, someone approached me. She was a voice teacher at the conservatory there, and that conservatory had an apprenticeship with the Kansas City Lyric Opera. And she said I knew you was an undergrad. My husband works where you, where you went to school, and I have been watching you for a long time. And I wish you quit this nonsense of singing Broadway and jazz and rock and everything and get serious, you know, and try opera. So I thought she was crazy to bring that up, but it wasn't the first time it had been brought up. So I have been teaching for a year, and at the end of that school year, I announced everyone I was going to graduate school and I was going to study opera. And so   Michael Hingson ** 08:55 what were you teaching?   Kay Sparling ** 08:57 I was teaching high school choir, okay, at a very big high school, very, very good choir department.   Michael Hingson ** 09:03 Now, by the way, after doing Gretel, did you ever have any other parts as you grew older in Sound of Music?   Kay Sparling ** 09:11 Okay, that's a very cool question. I am one of the few people that I know that can say I have sang every major role in Sound of Music sometime in my life. Ah, okay, because it was so popular when I was Oh, yeah. And as I would grow older, well now you're going to sing, you know, you just kept graduating up. And then pretty soon I sang quite a few Marias. And then after I was an opera singer. During covid, I was asked to sing Mother Superior. Mother Superior. Yeah, literally, have sung, you know, in a decades long career, I've sung every role in Sound of Music.   Michael Hingson ** 09:56 Cool. Well, that's great.   10:00 Yeah, so, so, anyway, so   Michael Hingson ** 10:02 you said that you were going to go study opera,   Kay Sparling ** 10:07 and I did a graduate school, and then I got the chance to get an international grant over to Europe, and so I decided to not finish my masters at that time and go over there and finish it, and most of all, importantly, do my first apprenticeship in Europe. And so I thought that was a great opportunity. They were willing. They were going to willing to pay for everything. And I said I would be a fool to turn this down. Yeah, so off I went, and that's kind of the rest of the story. You know, got a lot of great training, left Europe for a while, moved to New York City, trained best coaches and teachers in the world at the Metropolitan Opera and then, you know, launch my career.   Michael Hingson ** 11:04 So you Wow, you, you've done a number of things, of course, going to Europe and being in Vienna and places like that. Certainly you were in the the right place.   Kay Sparling ** 11:16 Yes, yes, definitely. You know, at that time in the in the middle 80s, United States was we had some great opera houses Iran, but we had very few. And it just wasn't the culture that it was in Europe, in Europe. And so, yes, there was a lot more opportunity there, because there was such a culture established there already.   Michael Hingson ** 11:44 So you went off and you did Europe and saying opera, what were you a soprano? Or what were you that sounds like a way a little high for your voice?   Kay Sparling ** 11:59 Well, you have to remember, I'm a senior citizen now. So this is the way it worked for me, because we're talking decades from the age 27 and I quit singing at 63 so that's a very long time to sing opera. So I started out, as you know, there is a voice kind of category, and each one of those, we use a German word for that. It's called Foch, F, A, C, H, and you know, that is determined by the kind of vocal cords you have, and the kind of training and the literature you're singing, and hopefully that all meshes together if you have good coaches and a good agent and such. And I literally have seen so many different Fox lyric, lyric mezzo, then to, very shortly, lyric soprano, and then for a long time, spinto soprano, which would be the Puccini and a lot of them really popular things. And then I was, I felt I was quite lucky that my voice did have the strength and did mature into a Verdi soprano, which is a dramatic soprano, not many of those around. And so that was, that was an endeavor, but at the same time, that was a leg up. And so most of the time in my career, I sang the bigger Puccini, like, let's say Tosca, and I sang a lot of Verdi. So I was an Italian opera singer. I mostly sang in Italian, not to say that I didn't sing in German or French, but I did very little in comparison to the   Michael Hingson ** 13:56 Italian Well, there's a lot of good Italian opera out there, although mostly I don't understand it, but I don't speak Italian well.   Kay Sparling ** 14:07 The great thing about most houses now is, you know, you can just look at the back of the seat in front of you, and there's the translation, you know, yeah, that   Michael Hingson ** 14:18 doesn't work for me. Being blind, that doesn't work for you. Yeah, that's okay, though, but I like the music, yeah. So how long ago did you quit singing?   Kay Sparling ** 14:32 Um, just about, well, under, just a little under three years ago, okay?   Michael Hingson ** 14:38 And why did you quit? This was the right time,   Kay Sparling ** 14:42 senses or what I had a circumstance, I had to have throat surgery. Now it wasn't on my vocal cords, but it was on my thyroid, and unfortunately, the vocal cord nerve. They had to take out some Cyst On. My right thyroid, and then remove it too. And unfortunately, my vocal cords were damaged at that time, I would have probably be singing still now some you know, I mean, because dramatic sopranos just can go on and on and on. One of my mentors was Birgit Nielsen, famous singer from Sweden, and she was in my grandmother's generation, but she didn't, I went to work with her, and she demonstrated at 77 she could still pop out of high C. And I believe, I believe I would have been able to do that too, but you know, circumstances, you know, changed, but that's okay. Yeah, I had sung a long time, and at least I can speak. So I'm just very happy about that.   Michael Hingson ** 15:51 So when you did quit singing, what did you decide to go do? Or, or, How did, how did you progress from there?   Kay Sparling ** 16:01 Well, I had already made a transition where I had come in 2003 to the Midwest. I came back from New York City, where I lived many, many years, and I started a conservatory of music and acting, and then that kind of grew into a whole conservatory of music. So I was also a part time professor here in Wisconsin, and I taught voice, you know, one on one vocal lessons, so high school and college and graduate school, and so I had this huge studio. So when that happened, I wasn't getting to sing a whole lot, because I was much more focused on my students singing me at that point, especially the older ones, professional ones, and so, you know, I just kept teaching and and then I had started this book that I'm promoting now, and so that gave me more time to get that book finished   Michael Hingson ** 17:10 and published. What's the name of the book?   Kay Sparling ** 17:13 The book is called Mission, thaw.   Michael Hingson ** 17:16 Ah, okay, and what is it about   Kay Sparling ** 17:22 mission thaw is feminist spy thriller set at the very end of the Cold War in the late 80s, and the main protagonist is Caitlin Stewart, who it who has went over there to be an opera singer, and soon after she arrives, is intensely recruited by the CIA. They have a mission. They really, really need a prima donna Mozart soprano, which is what Caitlin was, and she had won a lot of competitions and won a grant to go over there, and so they had been vetting her in graduate school in the United States. And soon as she came to Europe, they they recruited her within a couple weeks of her being there, and she, of course, is totally blindsided by that. When they approach her, she had she she recognized that things were not exactly the way they should be, that people were following her, and she was trying to figure out who, are these people and why are they following me everywhere? Well, it ends up being young CIA agents, and so when the head chief and his, you know, the second chief, approach her, you know, she's not real happy, because she's already felt violated, like her privacy has been violated, and so she wasn't really too wonderful of listening to them and their needs. And so they just sort of apprehend her and and throw her in a car, in a tinted window Mercedes, and off they go to a park to talk to her, right? And so it's all like crazy movie to Caitlin. It's like, what is going on here? And, you know, she can tell they're all Americans, and they have dark suits on, even though it's very, very hot, and dark glasses, you know? So everything is just like a movie. And so when they approach her and tell her about what they need her to do, you know, and this would be in addition to the apprentice she is doing that, you know, she just gets up and says, I'm sorry I didn't come over and be in cloak and dagger. A, you know, ring, I'm getting out of here. And as she's walking away, the chief says, Well, what if you could help bring down the Berlin Wall? Well, now that stops her in her tracks, and she turns around. She goes, What are you kidding? I'm just a, you know, an opera apprentice from the Midwest grew up on a farm. What am I gonna do? Hit a high C and knock it down. I mean, what are you talking about?   Michael Hingson ** 20:28 Hey, Joshua, brought down the wealth of Jericho, after all. Well, yeah, some   Kay Sparling ** 20:34 later, someone tells her that, actually, but, but anyway, they say, well, sit down and we'll explain what we need you to do. And so the the initial job that Caitlin accepts and the CIA to be trained to do is what they call a high profile information gap. She has a wonderful personality. She's really pretty. She's very fashionable, so she can run with the jet set. And usually the jet set in Europe, the opera jet set is also where all the heads of states hang out, too. And at that time, the the Prime Minister was pretty much banking the Vienna State Opera where she was apprenticing. So he ends up being along with many other Western Austrian businessmen in a cartel of human trafficking. Who they are trafficking are all the the different citizens of the countries that USSR let go. You know, when you know just got to be too much. Remember how, oh yeah, we're going to let you go. Okay? And then they would just pull out. And there was no infrastructure. There was nothing. And these poor people didn't have jobs, they didn't have electricity. The Russian mafia was running in there trying to take, you know, take over. It was, it was chaos. And so these poor people were just packing up what they could to carry, and literally, sometimes walking or maybe taking a train into the first Western European country they could get to. And for a lot of them, just because the geographical area that was Austria. And so basically, the Austrians did not want these people, and they were being very unwelcoming and arresting a lot of them, and there was a lot of lot of bad behavior towards these refugees. And so the Catholic church, the Catholic Social Services, the Mennonite Relief Fund, the the UN and the Red Cross started building just tent after tent after tent on the edge of town for these people to stay at. And so the businessmen decide, well, we can traffic these people that have nothing over to the East Germans, who will promise them everything, but will give them nothing. But, you know, death camps, basically, just like in World War Two. So you have work camps, you have factories. They they don't feed these people correctly. They don't they don't give them anything that they promise to them in in the camps. And they say, Okay, be on this train at this time, this night. And then they stop somewhere in between Vienna and East Germany, in a very small train station in the middle of the Alps. And they have these large, you know, basic slave options. And unfortunately, the children in the older people get sent back to the camp because they don't need them or want them. So all the children get displaced from their families, as well as the senior citizens or anyone with a disability. And then, you know, the men and the women that can work are broken up as well, and they're sent to these, you know, they're bought by these owners of these factories and farms, and the beautiful women, of course, are sold to either an individual that's there in East German that just wants to have a sex aid, pretty much. Or even worse, they could be sold to an underground East Berlin men's club. And so terrible, terrible things happen to the women in particular, and the more that Caitlin learns. As she's being trained about what's happening, and she interviews a lot of these women, and she sees the results of what's happened, it, it, it really strengthens her and gives her courage. And that's a good thing, because as time goes through the mission, she ends up having to be much, much more than just a high profile social, you know, information gather. She ends up being a combat agent and so, but that that's in the mission as you read, that that happens gradually and so, what? What I think is really a good relationship in this story, is that the one that trains her, because this is actually both CIA and MI six are working on this, on this mission, thought and the director of the whole mission is an very seasoned mi six agent who everyone considers the best spy in the free world. And Ian Fleming himself this, this is true. Fact. Would go to this man and consult with him when he was writing a new book, to make sure you know that he was what he was saying is, Could this really happen? And that becomes that person, Clive Matthews become praying, Caitlyn, particularly when she has to start changing and, you know, defending herself. And possibly, you know,   Michael Hingson ** 26:38 so he becomes her teacher in   Kay Sparling ** 26:42 every way. Yes. So how   Michael Hingson ** 26:45 much? Gee, lots of questions. First of all, how much of the story is actually   Kay Sparling ** 26:50 true? All this story is true. The   Michael Hingson ** 26:53 whole mission is true. Yes, sir. And so how did you learn about this? What? What caused you to start to decide to write this story?   Kay Sparling ** 27:08 So some of these experiences are my own experiences. And so after I as an opera singer, decided to be a volunteer to help out these refugees. I witnessed a lot, and so many years later, I was being treated for PTSD because of what I'd witnessed there. And then a little bit later in Bosnia in the early 90s, and I was taking music therapy and art therapy, and my psychiatrist thought that it'd be a good idea if also I journaled, you know, the things that I saw. And so I started writing things, and then I turned it in, and they had a person that was an intern that was working with him, and both of them encouraged me. They said, wow, if, if there's more to say about this, you should write a book, cuz this is really, really, really good stuff. And so at one point I thought, Well, why not? I will try. So this book is exactly what happened Caitlin, you know, is a real person, and everyone in the book is real. Of course, I changed the names to protect people and their descriptions, but I, you know, I just interviewed a lot of spies that were involved. So, yes, this is a true story.   Michael Hingson ** 29:06 Did you do most of this? Then, after your singing career, were you writing while the career, while you were singing?   Kay Sparling ** 29:13 I was writing while I was still singing. Yeah, I started the book in 2015 Okay, and because, as I was taking the PTSD treatment and had to put it on the shelf several times, life got in the way. I got my my teaching career just really took off. And then I was still singing quite a bit. And then on top of it, everything kind of ceased in 2018 when my mother moved in with me and she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, but Louie body Alzheimer's, which is a very, very rough time, and so I became one of her caretakers. So I quit singing, put that on hold, and I. I had to really, really bring down the number in my studio I was teaching and spend time here at home. And so I would take care of her, but then after she would go to bed, and she'd go to bed much earlier than I wanted to, that's when I write, and that's when I got the lion's share of this book written. Was during that time, it was a great escape from what I was dealing with, believe it or not, you know, even though there's some real graphic things in the book and all it wasn't, it was a nice distraction.   Michael Hingson ** 30:36 Wow, so you, you lived this, needless to say,   Kay Sparling ** 30:41 Yes, I did, and yes.   Michael Hingson ** 30:45 So you've talked a little bit about what happened to these countries after the collapse of the USSR and communism and so on, these eastern companies, companies, countries. Has it changed much over the years.   Kay Sparling ** 31:03 Oh, yeah, for instance, one, you know, I went to Budapest after they were freed, I guess is what usr would say. Stayed in a five star hotel, and we were lucky if we had running water and electricity at the same time. And every time you went down on the streets, all you'd see is lines, you know, I mean, just because there'd be all like, Red Cross, etc, would be there, and they'd have these big trucks they drove in every day, and it just got to be because they had nothing. If you saw a truck, you'd start running towards it and get in line. You didn't care what it was, you know, and it was. And then fights would break out because they wouldn't have enough for everyone. And then, like, you know, maybe someone's walking away with a bag of rice, and some of us knock them over the head and take, you know, and it was very hard, you know, I was a volunteer there, and it was very, very hard to see this, you know, desperation, one story that I'd like to tell, and I put it in the book. I was riding my bike, you know, on a Friday afternoon to get some groceries at the nearest supermarket where my apartment was, and at that time, they still had the European hours, so they were going to close at five o'clock, and they weren't going to open until seven or eight on Monday morning. So you had to make sure you got there to get your weekend supply. So I was on my way, and I was parking my bike, and this woman, refugee woman, runs up and she has two small children with her, and she's carrying a baby, and she's speaking to me in a language I did not know. I do speak several languages, but I don't know Slavic languages and so, but I'm getting the gist of it that she has nothing to eat, neither do her children, and so I'm patting her on the shoulder, and right when I do that, a policeman that was guarding the door of the supermarket came up to me and, like, grabbed me really hard, and told me in German that I was not To speak to them, and I was not to help them, because if you help them, they'll stay. And I said to him in German, I'm an American. I am not Austrian. I am here on a work visa, and I can do whatever the hell I want to do. Well, he didn't like that. And so I just walked away from him, and I went in the store. And so I got up everything I get. Think of the big need, you know, I never had a baby, so I was trying to kind of figure that out, yeah, and I had to figure it out in German, you know, looking at labels now. And so finally I got, I got some stuff, you know, the stuff I needed, and, and, and the stuff that I got for the family, and I checked out, and I'm pushing the cart, you know, towards them. And he runs up beside me and stops me, and he says, I am going to arrest you if you bring that. I told you not to help them. And I said, again, I don't think I'm breaking any laws. And he said, Oh yes, you are. And I said, Well, I didn't read that in the papers. I didn't see it on TV where anyone said. That you cannot help a refugee. And so we're going back and forth. And so, you know, I'm pretty strong, so I just keep pushing it towards it. Well, she's kind of running down the park, and I'm like, wait, wait, you know, because she's getting scared of this guy, you know, he has a gun, he has a nightstick. Of course, she's scared, and so, you know, I would say, No, no, it's okay, because I can't speak for language, right? And so I'm just trying to give her body language and talk. Well, finally she does stop, and I just throw I give the one sack to the little boy, and one second little girl, they just run and and then, you know, I'm talking to her and saying, you know, it's okay, it's okay. And he grabs me, and he turns me around and he spits in my face.   Michael Hingson ** 35:53 Wow. Talk about breaking the law. But anyway, go ahead.   Kay Sparling ** 36:00 Welcome to Austria in the late 80s. You have to understand their Prime Minister Kurt voltheim won on the Nazi ticket. Mm, hmm. At that very time, if you got on a bus and you saw these businessmen going to work, at least 50% of them were reading the Nazi paper. Okay, so we kind of know what, where his affiliations lie. You know, this policeman and, you know, and I was very aware, you know, of of that party being very strong. And so you have to watch yourself when, when you're a foreigner. And I was a foreigner too, just like her. And so after wiping my face, I mean, I really, really wanted to give him a kick or something, yeah, and I do, I do know martial arts, but I was like, no, no, gotta stay cool. And I just told her to run. And she did and caught up with the children, and, you know, kept running. So that was the first experience I had knowing how unwelcome these people were in Austria. Yeah, so I got involved, yeah, I got involved because I was like, this is absolutely not right.   Michael Hingson ** 37:31 And so the book is, in part, to try to bring awareness to all that. I would think   Kay Sparling ** 37:36 absolutely there are, there are bits of it are, they're pretty darn graphic, but it's all true, and it's all documented. Sometimes people about human trafficking, they think, oh, it's not in my backyard. I'm not going to think about that. Well, I live in a very small college town, around 17,000 people, and two months ago, on the front page of this small paper here in town, there were seven men that were arrested for many counts of human trafficking of underage women and prostitution. So guess what, folks, it is in your backyard. If it's in this little town, it's probably in yours too. And we have to be aware before we can do anything. So we have to open our eyes. And I hope this book opens the eyes of the reader to say, Oh, my God, I knew things were bad, but I didn't realize that torture, this kind of thing went on. Well, it does, and I the International Labor Union estimates that 21 million people are being you. You are victims of human trafficking right now, as we speak, throughout the world, that's a lot of people, a lot of people. So most likely, we've all seen some hint of that going on, it didn't register as it at the time. You know, if you're just walked out of a restaurant, and you're walking to your car that's parked on the street, and you happen to go by an alley and there's restaurants on that row, and all of a sudden you see people being kind of shoved out and put in a truck. That's probably human trafficking, you know? And you know, a lot of people don't pay attention, but like, if they stop and think that doesn't look right, and if those people look like they may be from another country, yeah. And all you have to do is call the authorities, you know, and other ways that you can help are by you know, that that you can get involved. Are, you know, donate to all the different organizations that are finding this now.   Michael Hingson ** 40:19 Was the book self published, or do you have a publisher?   Kay Sparling ** 40:25 I self published, but it's more of a hybrid publishing company that's kind of a new thing that's going on, and so I cannot learn all those different facets of publishing a book, right? It just wasn't in my, you know, skill set, and it also wasn't even interesting to me. I don't want to learn how to do graphic illustration. Okay? So what I did is I hired a hybrid company that had all these different departments that dealt with this, and I had complete artistic control, and I was able to negotiate a great deal on my net profits. So I feel that, after looking into the traditional publishing world and not being exactly pleased with it to say the least, I think that was the right business choice for me to make, and I'm very happy I did it.   Michael Hingson ** 41:46 How do you market the book then?   Kay Sparling ** 41:48 Well, that was, that was the tricky part that that publisher did have some marketing they started, but obviously now they agreed it wasn't enough. So at that point, I attended a virtual women's publishing seminar, and I really paid attention to all the companies that were presenting about marketing. And in that time, I felt one that I just was totally drawn to, and so I asked her if we could have a consultation, and we did, and the rest is history. I did hire her team and a publicist, Mickey, who you probably know, and, yeah, it's been going really great. That was the second smart thing I did, was to, you know, hire, hire a publicity.   Michael Hingson ** 42:50 Well, yeah, and marketing is one is a is a tricky thing. It's not the most complicated thing in the world, but you do have to learn it, and you have to be disciplined. So good for you, for for finding someone to help, but you obviously recognize the need to market, which is extremely important, and traditional publishers don't do nearly as much of it as they used to. Of course, there are probably a lot more authors than there used to be too. But still,   Kay Sparling ** 43:19 yeah, their their marketing has changed completely. I remember I had a roommate that became a famous author, and just thinking about when he started, you know, in the 80s, how the industry is completely changed. Mm, hmm, you know. So, yeah, it's, it's really tricky. The whole thing is very tricky. One thing that I also did is one of my graduate students needed a job, and so I've known her since, literally, I've known her since eighth grade. I have been with this student a long time, and she's done very well, but she really is a wiz at the social media. And so she made all my accounts. I think I have 12 altogether, and every time I do something like what I'm doing tonight, soon as it's released, she just puts it out there, everywhere and and I have to thank her from again that that's probably not my skill set.   Michael Hingson ** 44:37 Well, everyone has gifts, right? And the the people who I think are the most successful are the people who recognize that they have gifts. There are other people that have gifts that will augment or enhance what they do. And it's good that you find ways to collaborate. I think collaborating is such an important thing. Oh, yeah. All too many people don't. They think that they can just do it all in and then some people can. I mean, I know that there are some people who can, but a lot of people don't and can't.   Kay Sparling ** 45:12 Well, I've got other things. I've got going, you know, so maybe if I only had to do the book, everything to do with the book, that would be one thing, but I, you know, I have other things I have to have in my life. And so I think that collaboration is also fun, and I'm very good at delegating. I have been very good at delegating for a long time. When I started my school. I also started a theater company, and if you know one thing, it's a three ring circus to produce an opera or a musical, and I've done a lot of them, and yeah, I would have not survived if I didn't learn how to delegate and trust people to do their own thing. So what are you   Michael Hingson ** 45:58 doing today? What are you doing today? Besides writing?   Kay Sparling ** 46:04 Well, during covid, everything got shut down, and I didn't have an income, and I had to do something. And one of, believe it or not, one of my parents, of one of my students, is an attorney for the state of Wisconsin, and she was very worried. I mean, it looked like I might lose my house. I mean, I literally had no income. And so, you know, I was a small business person, and so she offered me very graciously to come work in the department of workers compensation in the legal Bureau at the state of Wisconsin. So I never have done anything like that in my life. I have never sat in a cubicle. I've never sat in front of a computer unless it was in its recording studio or something like that. So it was a crazy thing to have to do in my early 60s, but I'm a single woman, and I had to do it, and and I did, and it put me on solid ground, and that was one reason I couldn't finish the book, because I didn't have to worry about a live cookie. And so I am continuing to do that in so as in the day, that is what I do. I'm a legal assistant, cool.   Michael Hingson ** 47:32 And so when did mission thought get published?   Kay Sparling ** 47:38 Mission thought almost a year ago, in August of 2024 it launched, yes, okay, yeah. And it was very scary for me, you know, because my hybrid publishers up in Canada, and they were telling me, Well, you know, we're going to get you some editorial reviews and we're going to have you be interviewed. And you know, those very first things where my editor at at the publisher had told me it was one of the really a good book, and that was one of the cleanest books she ever had to edit. And so that kind of gave me some confidence. But you understand, look at my background. I I didn't go to school to be a writer. I had never studied writing. I hadn't done any writing up until now, and so to that was my first kind of sigh of relief when the editor at the publisher said it was really a good book, and then I started getting the editorial reviews, and they were all stellar, and they continue to be. And I'm, I'm still a little shocked, you know, because it takes time, I guess, for a person to switch gears and identify themselves as an author. But you know, after a year now, I'm feeling much more comfortable in my shoes about that. But at first it was, it was trying because I was scared and I was worried, you know, what people were going to think about the book, not the story, so much as how it was crafted. But it ends up, well,   Michael Hingson ** 49:15 it ends up being part of the same thing, and yeah, the very fact that they love it that that means a lot. Yeah, so is, is there more in the way of adventures from Caitlin coming up or what's happening?   Kay Sparling ** 49:30 Yeah, this is hopefully a trilogy, um of Caitlin's most important standout missions. And so the second one is set in the early 90s during the Bosnian war. And this time, she cannot use opera as a cover, because obviously in a war zone, there's no opera. And so she has to. To go undercover as either a un volunteer or Red Cross, and this time, her sidekick is not the Clive Matthews. He has actually started a special squad, combat squad that's going in because, of course, we, none of us, were really involved with that war, right? But that's what he's doing. And so, believe it or not, her, her sidekick, so to speak, is a priest that very early, goes on and sees, you know, this absolute ethnic cleansing going on, you know, massacres and and he tries to get the Catholic Church to help, and they're like, no, no, we're not touching that. And so he goes AWOL. And had been friends in Vienna with the CIA during the first book. He goes to the CIA and says, This is what's going on. I saw it with my own eyes. I want to help. And so he becomes Caitlin's sidekick, which is a very interesting relationship. You know, Caitlin, the opera singer, kind of, kind of modern girl, you know, and then you know, the kind of staunch priest. But they find a way to work together, and they have to, because they have to save each other's lives a couple times. And this is my favorite book of the three. And so basically what happens is called Mission impromptu, and I hope to have that finished at the end of this month. And the reason we call it impromptu is because her chief tells her to just get the information and get out, but her and the priest find out that there is a camp of orphaned boys that they are planning to come massacre, and so they they they basically go rogue and don't follow orders and go try to help the boys. Yeah. And then the third book, she has actually moved back to New York, and she's thinking, well, she does retire from the CIA, and it's the summer of 2001 and what happened in September of 2001 911 and so they call her right back in she literally had been retired for about three months.   Michael Hingson ** 52:35 Well, to my knowledge, I never met Caitlin, so I'm just saying Mm hmm, having been in the World Trade Center on September 11, but I don't think I met Caitlin anyway.   Kay Sparling ** 52:43 Go ahead. No, she wasn't in the towers, but no, I was in New York. And yeah, so they called her back right away. And so the third one is going to be called Mission home front, because that's been her home for a very long time. She's been living in New York.   Michael Hingson ** 53:01 Are there plans for Caitlin beyond these three books? I hope so.   Kay Sparling ** 53:08 I think it would be fun for her to retire from the CIA and then move back to the Midwest. And, you know, it turned into a complete fiction. Of course, this is not true stuff, but, you know, like kind of a cozy mystery series, right, where things happen and people can't get anyone to really investigate it, so they come to Caitlin, and then maybe her ex boss, you know, the chief that's also retired, they kind of, you know, gang up and become pi type, you know, right? I'm thinking that might be a fun thing.   Michael Hingson ** 53:46 Now, are mostly books two and three in the mission series. Are they also relatively non fiction?   53:53 Yes, okay,   Michael Hingson ** 53:57 okay, cool, yes. Well, you know, it's, it's pretty fascinating to to hear all of this and to to see it, to hear about it from you, but to see it coming together, that is, that is really pretty cool to you know, to see you experiencing have the book, has mission thought been converted by any chance to audio? Is it available on Audible or   Kay Sparling ** 54:21 anywhere it has not but it is in my plans. It's there's a little bit of choice I have to make do. I use my publisher and hire one of their readers you know to do it, someone you know, that's in equity, that type of thing. Or you know, my publicity, or people are also saying, well, because you're an actor, and, you know, all these accents, it might be nice for you to do to read your own book. Well, the problem is time, you know, just the time to do it, because I'm so busy promoting the book right now. And really. Right writing the second one that you know, I just don't know if I'm going to be able to pull that off, but I have my own records, recording studio in my voice studio downstairs, but it's just and I have all the equipment I have engineers. It's just a matter of me being able to take the time to practice and to get that done. So it's probably going to be, I'll just use their, one of their people, but yes, yeah, it's coming. It's coming. Well, it's,   Michael Hingson ** 55:29 it's tough. I know when we published last year, live like a guide dog, and the publisher, we did it through a traditional publisher, they worked with dreamscape to create an audio version. And I actually auditioned remotely several authors and chose one. But it is hard to really find someone to read the book the way you want it read, because you know what it's like, and so there is merit to you taking the time to read it. But still, as you said, there are a lot of things going on,   Kay Sparling ** 56:09 yeah, and I have read, you know, certain portions of the book, because some podcasts that I've been on asked me to do that, and I and I practiced and that, it went very well. And of course, when people hear that, they're like, Oh, you're the one that has to do this. You know Caitlin. You can speak her, you know her attitudes and all. And then you also know how to throw all those different accents out there, because there's going to be, like, several, there's Dutch, there's German, there's Scottish, high British and Austrian. I mean, yeah, yeah, Austrians speak different than Germans. Mm, hmm,   Michael Hingson ** 56:53 yeah, it's it's a challenge, but it's still something worth considering, because you're going to bring a dimension to it that no one else really can because you wrote it and you really know what you want them to sound like, Yeah, but it's a it's a process. I and I appreciate that, but you've got lots going on, and you have to have an income. I know for me, we started live like a guide dog my latest book when the pandemic began, because I realized that although I had talked about getting out of the World Trade Center and doing so without exhibiting fear, didn't mean that it wasn't there, but I realized that I had learned to control fear, because I learned a lot that I was able to put to use on the Day of the emergency. And so the result of that was that, in fact, the mindset kicked in and I was able to function, but I never taught anyone how to do that. And so the intent of live like a guide dog was to be a way that people could learn how to control fear and not let fear overwhelm or, as I put it, blind them, but rather use fear as a very powerful tool to help you focus and do the things that you really need to do. But it's a choice. People have to learn that they can make that choice and they can control it, which is kind of what really brought the book to to mind. And the result was that we then, then did it. And so it came out last August as well.   Kay Sparling ** 58:27 Oh, well, if you read my book, you'll see Caitlin developing the same skills you were just talking about. She has to overcome fear all the time, because she's never been in these situations before, and yet she has to survive, you know?   Michael Hingson ** 58:44 Yeah, well, and the reality is that most of us take too many things for granted and don't really learn. But if you learn, for example, if there's an emergency, do you know where to go in the case of an emergency? Do you know how to evacuate, not by reading the signs? Do you know? And that's the difference, the people who know have a mindset that will help them be a lot more likely to be able to survive, because they know what all the options are, and if there's a way to get out, they know what they are, rather than relying on signs, which may or may not even be available to you if you're in a smoke filled environment, for example, yeah,   Kay Sparling ** 59:22 yeah, you should know ahead of time. Yeah, you know, I know the state where I work. I I mostly work at home. I'm able to do that, but we do have to go in once a week, and we just changed floors. They've been doing a lot of remodeling, and that was the first thing, you know, the supervisor wanted us to do was walk through all the way for a tornado, fire, etc, and so we did that, you know, and that's smart, because then you're like, you say you're not trying to look at a chart as you're running or whatever,   Michael Hingson ** 59:56 and you may need to do it more than once to make sure you really know it. I know for me. I spent a lot of time walking around the World Trade Center. In fact, I didn't even use my guide dog. I used a cane, because with a cane, I'll find things that the dog would just automatically go around or ignore, like kiosks and other things. But I want to know where all that stuff is, because I want to know what all the shops are down on the first floor. Well, now that that is the case anymore, but it was at the time there was a shopping mall and knowing where everything was, but also knowing where different offices were, knowing who was in which offices, and then knowing the really important things that most people don't know about, like where the Estee Lauder second store was on the 46th floor of tower two. You know, you got to have the important things for wives, and so I learned what that was. Well, it was, it was, those are important things, but you'll learn a lot, and it's real knowledge. Someone, a recent podcast episode that they were on, said something very interesting, and that is that we're always getting information, but information isn't knowing it. Knowledge is really internalizing the information and making it part of our psyche and really getting us to the point where we truly know it and can put it to use. And that is so true. It isn't just getting information. Well, that's great. I know that now, well, no, you don't necessarily know it now, until you internalize it, until you truly make it part of your knowledge. And I think that's something that a lot of people miss. Well, this has been a lot of fun. If people want to reach out to you, is there a way they can do that?   Kay Sparling ** 1:01:40 Yeah, the best thing is my book website, K, Sparling books.com spelled and it would K, a, y, s, p, as in Paul, A, R, L, I N, G, B, O, O, K, s.com.com, okay, and you can email me through there. And all the media that I've been on is in the media section. The editorial reviews are there. There's another thing that my student heats up for me is the website. It's it's really developed. And so lots of information about the book and about me on on there. And one thing I want to mention is, just because of my background and all the all the people that you know, I know, a friend of mine is a composer, and he wrote a song, a theme song, because we do hope that someday we can sell this, you know, yeah, to for movie and, or, you know, Netflix, or something like that. And so he wrote a theme song and theme music. And I just think that's fun. And then I wanted my students saying, saying it. And then, you know, it's with a rock band, but it's, it's very James Bond, the kind of with a little opera, you know, involved too. But, you know, not a lot of authors can say that on their website, they have a theme song for their books.   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:16 And where is   Kay Sparling ** 1:03:18 it? It would be under, it's going to be about the author. And there's a nice one of my other students is a graphic artist. She She did a graphic a scene of Caitlin with her ball gown, and she's got her foot up on a stool, and she's putting her pistol in her thigh holster, in I think, you know, it's kind of like a cartoon, and it quotes Caitlin saying, I bet you I'm going to be the only bell at the ball with this accessory pistol. And then right underneath that, that song, you can click it and hear it. We also are on YouTube mission. Thought does have its own YouTube channel, so you can find it there as well.   Michael Hingson ** 1:04:05 So well, I want to thank you for being here and for telling us all the stories and especially about mission. I hope people will get it and read it, and I look forward to it coming out in audio at some point. Yes, I'll be lazy and wait for that, I I like to to get books with human readers. You know, I can get the print book and I can play it with a synthetic voice, but I, I really prefer human voices. And I know a lot of people who do AI has not progressed to the point where it really can pull that off.   Kay Sparling ** 1:04:38 Well, no, it cannot. Yeah, I totally agree with you there.   Michael Hingson ** 1:04:42 So Well, thank you for being here, and I want to thank all of you for listening and watching us today. This has been fun. And as some of you know, if you listen to many of these podcasts, we have a rule on the podcast, you can't come on unless you're going to have fun. So we did have fun. We. You have fun? Yeah. See, there you go. I was gonna ask if you had fun. Of course, yes. So thank you all for listening. Love to hear from you. Love to hear what your thoughts are about today's episode. Feel free to email me at Michael H, i@accessibe.com that's m, I, C, H, A, E, L, H, I at accessibe, A, C, E, S, S, i, b, e.com, also, please give us a five star rating. We appreciate it. K, I'll appreciate it. And when this goes up, when you hear it, we really value those ratings and reviews very highly. If you know anyone else who ought to be a guest and KU as well, love to hear from you. Please introduce us. Kay, you'll have to introduce us to Caitlin, but But seriously, we always are looking for more guests. So if anyone knows of anyone who ought to come on and tell a story, we'd love to hear from you. But again, Kay, I want to thank you one last time. This has been great, and we really appreciate you being here.   Kay Sparling ** 1:05:59 Well, thank you for having me.   Michael Hingson ** 1:06:04 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com . AccessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for Listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.

In this episode, I sit down with actor, author, and speaker Edwina Findley Dickerson to talk about her new book, The World Is Waiting for You. Edwina shares her journey of listening for God's voice, navigating seasons of waiting, and discovering a deeper purpose beyond achievement. Together, we explore the tension between intentional planning and radical surrender, how to overcome fear and step into our God-given dreams, and why true purpose is found not only in what we do, but in who we are becoming. This is a conversation for anyone longing to live with clarity, courage, and faith in a noisy world.Edwina Findley is an award-winning film, television, and theatre actress, celebrated by critics as "a marvel to watch." Known to global audiences as the hilarious 'Sheila' in Shonda Rhimes' hit Netflix series "The Residence," Edwina first captured hearts as 'Tosha' on HBO's groundbreaking series "The Wire,” and garnered critical attention for her role as Rosie in Ava DuVernay's Sundance award-winning feature "Middle of Nowhere.” She then earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Female for her "skin-prickling performance" in "Free In Deed.” A vibrant and versatile actress, Edwina starred opposite Toni Collette in Amazon's global thriller ”The Power,” as Kevin Hart's wife, Rita, in Warner Bros' hit comedy "Get Hard" with Will Ferrell, "Fear The Walking Dead," Tyler Perry's “If Loving You is Wrong,” HBO's “Veep,” “Rogue Agent,” “Black Lightning,” ”Chicago Med," HBO's "Treme," and "Shots Fired” from “Woman King” director Gina Prince-Bythewood.Edwina is a native of Washington, DC, where she attended Duke Ellington School of the Arts then studied drama at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Edwina continued her studies at UCLA, Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB), and with Yale Drama's Gregory Berger-Sorbeck. Theatrically, Edwina has performed around the world and at some of the nation's finest theaters, including The Kennedy Center, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Juilliard, Atlantic Theatre Company, Center Theatre Group, Baltimore Centerstage, and Cleveland Playhouse. Edwina received a Barrymore Award for Outstanding Lead Actress for the historical drama Gee's Bend, and an NAACP Theatre Award nomination for Eclipsed, set during the Liberian war.Proclaimed in the New York Times as a “life force,” Edwina is a global speaker, mentor, and CEO of Abundant Life University. Edwina's most cherished blessings are her loving husband Kelvin Dickerson and their bright and beautiful little girls, Victoria and London. Connect with Edwina at www.edwinafindley.comEdwina's Book:The World is Waiting For YouSubscribe to Our Substack: Shifting CultureConnect with Joshua: jjohnson@allnations.usGo to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.Follow on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, BlThe Balance of GrayFaith That Challenges. Conversations that Matter. Laughs included. Subscribe Now!Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the show

Jackson Welch is back on the pod, this time repping his band Champagne Lane and their debut album The World In Your Eyes. He and his bandmate Jake Rogers spent five years producing the record, and we get into what that long process was really like. We also talk yacht rock influences, Mk.Gee, nerding out on gear, and plenty more.

Minnesota has been ruled over by the iron fist of Democrats for decades, resulting in rampant injustice in our streets, abhorrent educational outcomes, and the erosion of basic rights.But, for some reason, the issue that seems to get the most traction in our state is fraud in government programs. We've had tons of it. Hundreds of millions. Approaching a billion. Likely much, much more.And the lie about all this fraud is that it's one big screw up. Gee wiz, we didn't mean it. How does this keep happening? We don't know.But it's increasingly apparent that Minnesota state government has been turned into a racketeering operation to financially benefit Democrat allies.Here are the receipts.Support the show

In this conversation with Dr. Cié Gee from the University of Texas at San Antonio we explore the idea of leadership through the roles of line leader and door holder–familiar responsibilities from elementary school. Dr. Gee argues that the door holder is a less glamorous but potentially more important role than the line leader, and we discuss ways door holding opportunities present themselves in the normal course of work.   Key Takeaways:Being the line leader can be fun, but being a door holder is a critical role for the success of any venture. Leadership doesn't require a title, and it doesn't require grand gestures to convey care and concern for the people one is leading. As Mother Teresa said, “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”If you're thinking about someone who held a door for you at some point in your career, reach out to them to let them know the effect they had on you.  Host:Doug McKennaUniversity Registrar, George Mason Universitycmckenn@gmu.edu   Guests:Dr. Cié GeeAssociate Vice Provost for Career-Engaged Learning, University of Texas at San Antonioginnifer.gee@utsa.edu References and Additional Information:Core Competencies: Leadership and ManagementCie Geehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/ciegee/   

Dr. Gee and Professor Stephen Kantrowitz discuss the erasure of history that has happened in other nations in order to understand the current US government attempts to control historical information and ideology. You will be shocked to hear the ways that historical and scientific research are being attacked through elimination of funding and discrediting of academic knowledge.  One of the current realities is that current students will be discouraged from seeking out new perspectives and the truth of historical perspectives because of perceived connections to DEI. Hear how government websites are removing African American and female-focused language in a censoring effort through the experience of one of Dr. Gee's friends and former guest.  Professor Kantrowitz explains the main issue in our country to be addressed is one of free and truthful speech. There is an attack on the truth of history and the realities of our world.  The Wayback Machine  a historian of race, citizenship, and Native-settler interaction in the United States. I am particularly interested in work that spans the antebellum, Civil War, and postbellum eras, and in the connections between the histories of slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction and the dynamics of Native American life and U.S. conquest. I have recently developed a research interest in the intellectual history of twentieth-century American anthropology in relation to Native-settler interaction.

Au programme de la 254e émission diffusée mardi 16 septembre 2025 à 15 h 30 : sujet principal : InterHop, l'association qui promeut, développe et met à disposition des logiciels libres pour la recherche en santé Jean-Christophe Becquet nous présente une Pépite Libre : « Des données fraîches sur la canicule » Une nouvelle Humeur de Gee : « L'inertie du clavier » quoi de Libre ? Actualités et annonces concernant l'April et le monde du Libre

Send us a textOkay, so here's the story: A pack of dogs on death row have adventures outside of the Big House and experience freedom. Did that happen? Oh, God! What if they were dead when we started and these are just conflated memories and patchwork pieces so we knew who they were. Maybe they didn't exist. Maybe on one could talk to the animals. Or, maybe this was a cartoon. Yeah, that makes me feel better.               Here now is the story of how this permanent home show came to Saturday Morning.              Where did this show come from?               Was it only created to sell toys to little kids?               Did they make a movie with a Hardee's tie-in? Spoilers: The answer is yes! Because Hardee's are whores.               All these questions, and more, will be answered in this look at POUND PUPPIES! Roll it!Thanks for ‘tooning in.  Share With Us: SatMornPod@hotmail.comBluesky: @SatMornPodYouTube Us: tinyurl.com/yyhpwjeo (Don't waste your time)   Featured Music:“Nostalgic Happy Music” by AudioJungle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxSUR6MQhw&t=2s “Happy Life” by Fredji - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzQiRABVARk Various Music by Oneul - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by302C2YhxY “I Feel You” by Kevin MacLeod” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw8E3jjbUCE “Nostalgic” by OrangeHead - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wExcRoNNzAc “Breakfast Club” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Spi22l3m5I “Horizons” by Atch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-u53MADIag “80's Hijack” by Gee - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndVqzJ9Lk6M&t=26s “Synthmania” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6r20TKnA6M “United” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArjGQFCcHxA “Cool Blue” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp5cxZWP-wc   #ABC #NBC #CBS #The80s #80s #cartoons #cartoon #animation #SaturdayMorning #1980 #1981 #1982 #1983 #1984 #1985 #1986 #1987 #1988 #1989 #Filmation #HannaBarbera #DePatieFreleng #RubySpears #Disney #PoundPuppies 

Synopsis Paranormal Investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga think they are retired from ghost busting, but just when you think you're out, the demons pull you back in. The Smurl family in Pennsylvania start experiencing malevolent supernatural happenings after the grandfather gives a terrible birthday gift to the second oldest daughter. A broken mirror. Gee thanks Grandpa. The hauntings ramp up and soon it is apparent that a demon is infesting the house. The Warrens reluctantly engage with the Smurls and soon find out that the demon has actually lured them into a trap.  Review of The Conjuring: Last Rights This is the ninth installment in the Conjuring Universe films, 11th if you include Wolves at the Door and Curse of La Llarona. In my opinion, if you've seen one, you've seen them all. That's not to say that this movie is bad. This movie along with all the other conjuring movies is competently made, maintains a consistent style, and has good acting. My criticism is that like the other films, this one prioritizes atmosphere and technique over substance. A beef I have with these movies is that they all suffer from what I call spooky house syndrome, where every house is dimly lit with 25 watt bulbs, and is suffering from a concerning amount of mold damage and electrical problems. Are they trying to scare us with ghosts or the horrors of home ownership? Similarly, the script is competent, but surface level. I can't tell you anything about the personalities of any of the characters outside of the tired tropes of “the protective father”, and the “brat sister”.  What the film does well is display some of the most professional turning around acting I've ever seen. After four films as Lorraine Warren, Vera Farmiga has perfected the art of slowly turning her head for effect. It works so well at establishing the tension that they do it about 178 times in this film. The film makers know you are coming for tension and jump scares, so that's what they prioritize here. There are some really great scenes of creepy dolls, whispered voices, and foreboding darkness that are masterclasses in technique. However they are all interchangeable and do little to move the story forward other than just increase the intensity.  Score 6/10

Today on another episode of the Rarified Heir Podcast, we are talking to Phil Crosby Jr., son of actor/singer Phil Crosby and grandson of Der Bingle himself, Bing Crosby. And if that isn't enough, he's the nephew of Gary Crosby, the stepson of Jack Klugman, the grandson of 1920's and 30s film star Dixie Lee and we haven't even told you all of his familial connections. Gee, ya think he was born into this? Phil spoke to us about his family but also his career as an in demand singer of jazz and songs from the Great American Songbook. As you will soon hear, we learn how he went from a blues, prog band 11:11 playing at spots like the much beloved The Palamino Club to in Los Angeles to a jazz club in Borneo, We get into it. Not one to pull punches, Phil also spoke to us about the troubled family history that has made the rounds over the years. He's quite open about it in fact and is fine talking about some of the claims his uncle Gary Crosby made in his tell-all book years ago. We also hear the flip side of that as he later found peace at the end of his life when he got sober. Along the way we hear about how his mother, actress Peggy Crosby Klugman, dated Dean Martin, how a trip to McDonald's turned Dino's car into a sardine can, how he and his father were estranged for much of his life until the birth of his first child, why he never met Bing, the two Christmas songs he's currently working on with another guest of the podcast and much more. This is the Rarified heir Podcast and everyone has a story. Take a listen.

URSULA'S TOP STORIES: Potential school shooting in Piece County thwarted // Ex-Alaska pilot receives time served // Mayor Harrell's high paid consultant // Seahawks get slapped at home // Rescue animals gone wrong and right // Gee's storytime

Kaleem Caire shares how his family, their audacity, and legacy have inspired him to create change in Madison. They discuss how Kaleem challenged Dr. Gee to build something new - his church, social justice non-profits, The Center for Black Excellence and Culture. The inspiration came from each other to see something new built.  Listen to how education is a major factor for the health of the community by investing in the next generation who will be running the community. Kaleem explains what is behind One City Schools and what they are doing different to shift the educational possibilities.  Leaders in the Black community face unique challenges and it is especially true when they are innovate. As a social innovator, Dr. Gee explores what Kaleem does to stay healthy and balanced in the stress of his work. Plus, hear new Black Ice Breakers that will make you laugh and find cultural connection. Learn more about One City Schools

Listen to ASCO's JCO Oncology Practice Art of Oncology article, "No Versus Know: Patient Empowerment Through Shared Decision Making” by Dr. Beatrice Preti, who is an Assistant Professor at Emory University. The article is followed by an interview with Preti and host Dr. Mikkael Sekeres. Dr Preti explores the challenges which may prevent oncologists from fully engaging with patients during shared decision making. TRANSCRIPT Narrator: No Versus Know: Patient Empowerment Through Shared Decision Making, by Beatrice T.B. Preti, MD, MMed, FRCPC  During a recent clinic, I saw three patients back-to-back, all from minority backgrounds, all referred for second opinions, all referenced in the notes for being different forms of difficult. Refused chemo, refused hospice, read one note. Refused surgery and chemo, read another, unsure about radiation. Yet, despite the documented refusals (I prefer the term, decline), they had come to my clinic for a reason. They were still seeking something. As an oncologist trained in a program with a strong emphasis on shared decision making between physician and patient, I approach such situations with curiosity. I consider optimal shared decision making a balance between the extremes of (1) providing a patient complete choice from a menu of treatment options, without physician input, and (2) indicating to a patient the best course of treatment, in the eyes of the physician.1 This is a balance between beneficence (which can often turn paternalistic) and patient autonomy and requires a carefully crafted art. Many of my consults start with an open question (Tell me about yourself…?), and we will examine goals, wishes, and values before ever touching on treatment options. This allows me to take the knowledge I have, and fit it within the scaffold of the patient in front of me. A patient emphasizing quantity of life at all costs and a patient emphasizing weekly fishing trips in their boat will receive the same treatment option lists, but with different emphases and discussions around each. Yet, many physicians find themselves tending toward paternalistic beneficence—logical, if we consider physicians to be compassionate individuals who want the best for their patients. All three patients I saw had been offered options that were medically appropriate, but declined them as they felt the options were not right for them. And all three patients I saw ended up selecting a presented option during our time together—not an option that would be considered the best or standard of care, or the most aggressive treatment, but an option that aligned most with their own goals, wishes, and values. This is of particular importance when caring for patients who harbor different cultural or religious views from our own; western medicine adopts many of its ideas and professional norms from certain mindsets and cultures which may not be the lenses through which our patients see the world. Even when a patient shares our personal cultural or religious background, they may still choose a path which differs from what we or our family might choose. It is vital to incorporate reflexivity in our practice, to be mindful of our own blinders, and to be open to different ways of seeing, thinking, and deciding. I will admit that, like many, I do struggle at times when a patient does not select the medically best treatment for themselves. But why? Do we fear legal repercussions or complaints down the road from not giving a patient the standard of care (often the strongest treatment available)? Do we struggle with moral distress when a patient makes a choice that we disagree with, based on values that we ourselves do not hold? Do we lack time in clinics to walk patients through different options, picking the method of counseling that allows the most efficiency in packed clinical systems? Is it too painful a reminder of our mortality to consider that, especially in the setting of terminally ill patients, aiming for anything other than a shot at the longest length of life might be a patient's preference? Or are we so burnt out from working in systems that deny us sufficient choice and autonomy (with regards to our own work, our own morals, and our own lives) that, under such repeated traumas, we lose touch with the idea of even having a choice? I have a number of patients in my clinic who transferred care after feeling caught between one (aggressive) treatment option and best supportive care alone. They come looking for options—an oral agent that allows them to travel, a targeted therapy that avoids immunosuppression, or a treatment that will be safe around dogs and small children. They are looking for someone to listen, to hold their hand, to fill in the gaps, as was told to me recently, and not skirt around the difficult conversations that both of us wish we did not have to have. Granted, some of the conversations are challenging—requests for ivermectin prescriptions, for example, or full resuscitation efforts patients with no foreseeable chance of recovery (from a medical standpoint) to allow for a possible divine miracle. However, in these cases, there are still goals, wishes and values—although ones that are not aligned with evidence-based medical practice that can be explored, even if they are challenging to navigate. As my clinic day went on, I spoke with my patients and their loved ones. One asked the difference between hospice and a funeral home, which explained their reluctance to pursue the former. Another asked for clarification of how one treatment can treat cancer in two different sites. And yet still another absorbed the information they requested and asked to come back another day to speak some more. All questions I have heard before and will continue to hear again. And again. There is no cure for many of the patients who enter my GI medical oncology clinic. But for fear, for confusion, perhaps there is. Cancer wreaks havoc on human lives. Plans go awry, dreams are shattered, and hopes are crushed. But we can afford some control—we can empower our patients back—by giving them choices. Sometimes, that choice is pitiful. Sometimes, it is an explanation why the most aggressive treatment option cannot be prescribed in good faith (performance status, bloodwork parametres), but it is a choice between a gentle treatment and no treatments. Sometimes it is a choice between home hospice and a hospice facility. I teach many of the learners who come through my clinic about the physician's toolbox, and the importance of cultivating the tools of one's specific specialty and area of work. For some (like surgeons), the tools are more tangible—physical skills, or even specific tools, like a particular scalpel or retractor. For others, like radiologists, it might be an ability—to recognize patterns, for example, or detect changes over time. For those of us in medical oncology, our toolbox can feel limiting at times. Although we have a handful of treatments tied to a specific disease site and histology, these often fall short of what we wish we could offer, especially when studies cite average survivals in months over years. But one of our most valuable tools—more valuable, I would argue, than any drug—is the communication we have with our patients, the way we can let them know that someone is there for them, that someone is here to listen, and that someone cares. Furthermore, the information we share—and the way we share it—has the potential to help shape the path that our patient's life will take moving forward—by empowering them with information to allow them to make the decisions best for them.2 Although having such conversations can be difficult and draining for the oncologist, they are a necessary and vital part of the job. My clinic team knows that we can have up to six, seven such conversations in the course of a half-day, and my clinic desk space is equipped for my between-patient routine of sips of tea and lo-fi beats, a precious few moments left undisturbed as much as possible to allow a bit of recharging. By finding a safe space where I can relax for a few moments, I can take care of myself, enabling me to give each of my patients the time and attention they need. When patients thank me after a long, difficult conversation, they are not thanking me for sharing devastating, life-altering news of metastatic cancer, prognoses in the order of months, or disease resistant to treatment. They are thanking me for listening, for caring, for seeing them as a person and affording the dignity of choice—autonomy. I have had patients make surprising decisions—opting for no treatment for locally-advanced cancers, or opting for gentle treatment when, medically, they could tolerate stronger. But by understanding their values, and listening to them as people, I can understand their choices, validate them, and help them along their journey in whatever way possible. Providing a choice affords a suffering human the right to define their path as long as they are able to. And we can give patients in such situations support and validation by being a guide during dark days and challenging times, remembering that medically best treatment is not always the best. When a patient says no to offered options, it does not (necessarily!) mean they are rejecting the expertise of the physician and care team. Rather, could it be a request to know more and work together with the team to find a strategy and solution which will be meaningful for them?   Mikkael Sekeres: Welcome back to JCO's Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology. This ASCO podcast features intimate narratives and perspectives from authors exploring their experiences in oncology. I'm your host, Mikkael Sekeres. I'm Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Hematology at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Miami. Today we're joined by Beatrice Preti, Assistant Professor at Emory University, Adjunct Professor at Western University, and PhD candidate with Maastricht University, to discuss her JCO Oncology Practice article, "No Versus Know: Patient Empowerment Through Shared Decision-Making." At the time of this recording, our guest has no disclosures. Beatrice, thank you so much for contributing to JCO Oncology Practice and for joining us to discuss your article. Beatrice Preti: Well, thank you so much for having me today. Mikkael Sekeres: It's an absolute treat. I was wondering if we could start with sort of a broad question. Can you tell us about yourself? What was your journey like that landed you where you are right now? Beatrice Preti: Oh goodness, that's a very loaded question. Well, I am originally from Canada. I did all my training in Canada at a couple of different schools, McMaster, Queens, Western University. Before medicine, I was always interested in the arts, always interested in writing, always interested in teaching. So that's something that's really, I guess, come forth throughout my medical practice. During my time at Western, I trained as a gastrointestinal medical oncologist, so that's my clinical practice. But on the side, as you've noted, I've done some work in medical education, got my Masters through Dundee, and now doing my PhD through Maastricht in the Netherlands, which I'm very excited about. Mikkael Sekeres: That's fantastic. What's your PhD in? Beatrice Preti: Health Professions Education. Mikkael Sekeres: Wonderful - can never get too much of that. And can I ask, are you at the stage now where you're developing a thesis and what's the topic? Beatrice Preti: Yeah, absolutely. So the program itself is almost exclusively research based. So I'm thinking of more of a social psychology side, looking at impression management and moral distress in medical trainees, and really along the continuum. So what we're looking at is when people act in ways or feel that they have to act in ways that aren't congruent with what they're feeling inside, why they're doing that and some of the moral tensions or the moral conflicts that go along with that. So a good example in medicine is when you're with a patient and you have to put on your professional face, but inside you might be squirming or you might be scared or worried or anxious or hungry, but you can't betray that with the patient because that would be unprofessional and also unfair to the patient. Mikkael Sekeres: Wow, that's absolutely fascinating. How does that change over the course of training? So how does it change from being a medical student to a resident or fellow to a junior faculty member? Beatrice Preti: So I'm only one year into the PhD, so I don't have all the information on this as yet. Mikkael Sekeres: You don't have all the answers yet? What are you talking about? Beatrice Preti: Yeah, they're telling me I have to finish the PhD to get all the answers, but I think that we certainly are seeing some kind of evolution, maybe both in the reasons why people are engaging in this impression management and the toll it takes on them as well. But stay tuned. It might take me a couple of years to answer that question in full. Mikkael Sekeres: Well, I just wonder as a, you know, as a medical student, we go into medical school often for reasons that are wonderful. I think almost every essay for somebody applying to medical school says something about wanting to help people, right? That's the basis for what draws us into medicine. And I wonder if our definition of what's morally right internally changes as we progress through our training. So something that would be an affront to our moral compass when we start as a medical student may not be such an affront later on when we're junior faculty. Beatrice Preti: Yes, definitely. And I think there's a lot of literature out there about coping in the medical profession because I think that by and large, especially in the lay community, so premedical students, for example, but even within our own profession as well, we don't really give enough credence to the impact a lot of the things that we do or witness have on us personally. That lack of insight doesn't allow us to explore coping mechanisms or at least think things through, and oftentimes what we're seeing is a survival instinct or a gut reaction kick in rather than something that we've carefully thought through and said, you know, “These situations are stressful for me, these situations are difficult. How can I cope? How can I make this more sustainable for me, knowing that this is an aspect of medicine that really isn't escapable.” Mikkael Sekeres: What a fascinating topic and area to be studying. I can't wait for all of the findings you're going to have over the course of your career. But oncology is a field that's, of course, rife with these sorts of conflicts. Beatrice Preti: Yeah, definitely. Mikkael Sekeres: I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about your own story as a writer. You say you've always been a writer. How long have you been writing reflective pieces? Beatrice Preti: Oh, goodness. So there's certainly a difference between how long I've been writing reflective pieces and how long I've been writing good reflective pieces. I can vaguely remember, I think being perhaps 10 years old and writing in school one recess period, sort of both sides of a loose leaf piece of paper, some form of reflection that would have ended up straight in the rubbish bin. So that was probably when it started. Certainly in medical school, I published a fair bit of reflective writing, poetry. That continued through residency, now as a junior attending as well. Mikkael Sekeres: Well, you're excellent at it and I can't see any rubbish can that would accept your pieces for the future. If you feel comfortable doing so, can you tell us what prompted you to write this particular piece? Beatrice Preti: Yes. So this piece was written Friday night around 9:00, 10:00 at night, literally at the end of the clinic day that I described. Coming on the heels of talking about coping, I think for many people in medicine, writing is a coping mechanism and a coping strategy that can be quite fruitful and productive, especially when we compare it to other potential coping strategies. Sometimes it's certainly difficult to write about some of the things we see and certainly it's difficult sometimes to find the words. But on this particular night, the words came quite easily, probably because this is not an isolated incident, unfortunately, where we're seeing patients coming for second opinions or you're encountering patients or you're encountering people who you are not directly treating in your everyday life, who express frustrations with the health care system, who express frustrations with not feeling heard. I think all you have to do is open social media, Facebook, Reddit, and you'll see many, many examples of frustrated individuals who felt that they weren't heard. And on one hand, I'm not naive enough to think that I've never left a patient encounter and had that patient not feeling heard. I'm guilty of many of the same things. Sometimes it's nothing that we've done as physicians, it's just you don't develop a rapport with the patient, right? But it made me think and it made me wonder and question, why is there this mismatch? Why are there so many patients who come seeking someone who listens, seeking a solution or a treatment that is maybe not standard, but might be a better fit for them than the standard? As you know, oncology is very algorithmic, and certainly, as many of the the fellows and residents who come into my clinic learn, yes, there are guidelines and yes, there are beautiful flow charts that teach us if you have this cancer, here's the treatment. But for me, that's only half of the practice of oncology. That's the scientific side. We then have the art side, which involves speaking to people, listening to them, seeing them as people, and then trying to fit what we're able to do, the resources we have, with what the patient's goals are, with their wishes or desires are. Mikkael Sekeres: I completely agree with you. I think sometimes patients come to our clinics, to an examination room, and they look at it as a place to be heard, and sometimes a safe space. You'll notice that, if you've been practicing long enough, you'll have some couples who come in and one of our patients will say something and the partner will reflect and say, "Gee, I never heard you say that before. I never knew that." So if people are coming in expecting to be heard in a safe space, it's almost nowhere more important to do that when it comes to treating their cancer also. Beatrice Preti: Yes. And as I say again to many of our learners, different specialties have different tools to treat or help alleviate sickness, illness, and suffering. For example, a surgeon has quite literal tools. They have their hands, they have their eyes, they're cutting, they're performing procedures. By and large, especially in medical oncology, we are quite limited. Certainly I have medications and drugs that I can prescribe, but in the world of GI oncology, often these are not going to lead to a cure. We are talking about survival in the order of months, maybe a year or two if we're very lucky. So the tool that we have and really the biggest, best treatment that we can give to our patients is our words and our time, right? It's those conversations that you have in clinic that really have the therapeutic benefit or potential for someone who is faced with a terminal illness and a poor prognosis more so than any drug or chemotherapy that I can give as a physician. Mikkael Sekeres: I love the notion that our words and our time are our tools for practicing medicine. It's beautiful. You mentioned in your essay three patients who, quote, and you're very deliberate about using the quote, "refused" because it's a loaded term, "refused" recommended medical intervention such as chemotherapy or surgery. Can you tell us about one of them? Beatrice Preti: Ah, well, I would have to be quite vague. Mikkael Sekeres: Of course, respecting HIPAA, of course. We don't want to violate anything. Beatrice Preti: But I think that was another thing too on this day that struck me quite a bit that it was three patients back to back with very similar stories, that they had been seen at other hospitals, they had been seen by other physicians - in one case, I think a couple of different physicians - and had really been offered the choice of, “Here is the standard of care, here is what the guidelines suggest we do, or you can choose to do nothing.” And certainly in the guidelines or in recommended treatment, you know, doublet chemotherapy, triplet therapy, whatever the case may be, this is what's recommended and this is what's standard. But for the patient in front of you, you know, whose goal may be to go to the beach for two months, right? “I don't want to be coming back and forth to the cancer center. Can I take a pill and maybe get blood work a few times while I'm there?” Or you have a patient who says, “You know, I tried the chemotherapy, I just can't do it. It's just too strong. And now they've told me I have to go to hospice if I'm not going to take the recommended treatment.” While in the guideline this may be correct for this patient who's in front of you, there may be another option which is more, in quotes, “correct”, because, is our goal to kill as many cancer cells as we can? Is our goal to shrink the cancer as much as we can? Is our goal even to eke out the maximum survival possible? As an oncologist, I would say no. Our goal is to try to line up what we can do, so the tools, the medications, the chemotherapies, the drugs that we do have in our tool kit, and the symptom medications as well, and line those up with what the patient's goals are, what the patient's wishes are. For many people, I find, when faced with a terminal illness, or faced with an illness with poor prognosis, their goal is not to eke out the last breath possible. They start to look at things like quality of life. They start to look at things like hobbies or travel or spending time with family. And oftentimes, the best way to facilitate that is not by doing the most aggressive treatment. Mikkael Sekeres: In my memory, you evoke an essay that was written for JCO's Art of Oncology by Tim Gilligan called "Knuckleheads" where he had a patient who was, big quotes, "refusing" chemotherapy for a curable cancer. And one of his colleagues referred to the patient as a knucklehead and they asked Tim to see the patient to try to suss out what was going on. And Tim, he used one of our tools. He talked to the person and it turns out he was a seasonal construction worker and it was summer and he was a single dad where the mother of his children wasn't involved in their care at all. And the only way he had to make money during the year was the work he did during the summer because he couldn't work in the winter. So for very primal reasons, he needed to keep working and couldn't take time to take chemotherapy. So they were able to negotiate a path forward that didn't compromise his health, but also didn't compromise his ability to make a living to support his family. But again, like you say, it's that people bring to these interactions stories that we can't even imagine that interfere with our recommendations for how they get cared for. Beatrice Preti: That's a beautiful example of something that I really do try to impress on my learners and my team in general. When someone comes to you and if a recommendation is made or even if they are skeptical about a certain treatment pathway, there is always a ‘why'. One of the challenges and one of the things that comes with experience is trying to uncover or unveil what that ‘why' is because unless you address it and address it head on, it's going to be very difficult to work with it, to work with the patient. So as you said, it's common people have family obligations, job obligations. Oftentimes as well, they have personal experience with certain treatments or certain conditions that they're worried about. Perhaps they had a loved one die on chemotherapy and they're worried about toxicities of chemo. And sometimes you can talk through those things. That needs to be considered, right? When we talk about shared decision-making, you, the patient, and it might be an experience that the patient has had as well that are all in the room that need to be taken into account. Mikkael Sekeres: You invoke the phrase "shared decision-making," which of course, you talk about in your essay. Can you define that for our listeners? What is shared decision-making? Beatrice Preti: Oh, goodness. There are different definitions of this and I am just cringing now because I know that my old teachers will not be happy regardless of what definition I choose. But for me, shared decision-making means that the decision of what to do next, treatment along the cancer journey, etc., is not decided by only one person. So it is not paternalism where I as the physician am making the decision. However, it's not the patient unilaterally making their own decision as well. It's a conversation that has to happen. And oftentimes when I'm counseling patients, I will write down what I see as potential treatment options for this patient and we will go through them one by one with pros and cons. This is usually after an initial bit where I get to know the patient, I ask them what's important to them, who's important in their life, what kind of things do they enjoy doing, and trying to weave that into the counseling and the discussion of the pros and cons. Ultimately, the patient does make the choice, but it's only after this kind of informed consent or this informative process, I guess, so to speak. And for me, that is shared decision-making where it's a conversation that results in the patient making a decision at the end. Mikkael Sekeres: You know, it's so funny you use the word ‘conversation'. I was going to say that shared decision-making implies a conversation, which is one of the reasons I love it. It's not a monologue. It's not just us listening. It's a back and forth until you know, we figure each other out. Beatrice Preti: Yes. Mikkael Sekeres: I wonder if I could ask you one more question. In your essay, you ask the question, "Do we struggle with moral distress when a patient makes a choice that we disagree with based on values that we ourselves do not hold?" Do you think you can answer your own question? Beatrice Preti: So this is getting to my academic work, and my PhD work that we spoke a little bit about in the beginning. I think it's something that we need to be mindful of. Certainly in my training, certainly when I was less experienced, there would be a lot of moral distress because we are not all clones of each other. We are people, but we have our own beliefs, we have our own backgrounds, we have our own experiences. There are times when people, and not just in medicine, but certainly in medicine, certainly patients make decisions that I don't quite understand because they are so different from what I would make or what I would choose for myself or for a family member. On the flip side, I think I've gotten myself, and I've had enough experience at this point in my career, to be able to separate that and say, you know, “But this is someone who has clearly thought things through and based on their own world view, their own perspectives, their own life experiences, this is the choice that's best for them.” And that's certainly something that I can support and I can work with a patient on. But it takes time, right? And it takes very deliberate thought, a lot of mindfulness, a lot of practice to be able to get to that point. Mikkael Sekeres: Well, I think that's a beautiful point to leave off with here. We've been talking to Beatrice Preti, who is an assistant professor at Emory University and an adjunct professor at Western University, and a PhD candidate with Maastricht University to discuss her JCO Oncology Practice article, "No Versus Know: Patient Empowerment Through Shared Decision-Making." Beatrice, thank you so much for joining me today. Beatrice Preti: Absolutely. Mikkael Sekeres: If you've enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with a friend or a colleague or leave us a review. Your feedback and support helps us continue to have these important conversations. If you're looking for more episodes and context, follow our show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and explore more from ASCO at asco.org/podcasts. Until next time, this has been Mikkael Sekeres for JCO Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology. The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Show Notes: Like, share and subscribe so you never miss an episode and leave a rating or review. Guest Bio: Dr Beatrice Preti is an Assistant Professor at Emory University Additional Material: Knuckleheads, by Dr Timothy Gilligan and accompanied podcast episode.  

Send us a textOkay, so here's the story: An alien comes to Earth and looks like a puzzle that took the world by storm. When he's scrambled, he's useless. But when he's solved – LOOK OUT!!! – He'll fight crime and put bad guys in their place. Throw in a dash of Hispanic representation and a certain Puerto Rican boy band, and you just might have a hit.               Here now is the story of how this logic-defying show came to Saturday Morning.              Where did this show come from?              How did Menudo get involved?              What is the world's most expensive Rubik's Cube?     All these questions, and more, will be answered in this look at RUBIK, THE AMAZING CUBE! Thanks for ‘tooning in.  Share With Us: SatMornPod@hotmail.comBluesky: @SatMornPodYouTube Us: tinyurl.com/yyhpwjeo (Don't waste your time)   Featured Music:“Nostalgic Happy Music” by AudioJungle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxSUR6MQhw&t=2s “Happy Life” by Fredji - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzQiRABVARk Various Music by Oneul - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by302C2YhxY “I Feel You” by Kevin MacLeod” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw8E3jjbUCE “Nostalgic” by OrangeHead - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wExcRoNNzAc “Breakfast Club” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Spi22l3m5I “Horizons” by Atch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-u53MADIag “80's Hijack” by Gee - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndVqzJ9Lk6M&t=26s “Synthmania” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6r20TKnA6M “United” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArjGQFCcHxA “Cool Blue” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp5cxZWP-wc   #ABC #NBC #CBS #The80s #80s #cartoons #cartoon #animation #SaturdayMorning #1980 #1981 #1982 #1983 #1984 #1985 #1986 #1987 #1988 #1989 #Filmation #HannaBarbera #DePatieFreleng #RubySpears #Disney #Superheroes 

Every so often, a popular, fan-favourite series takes such a hard turn into awful, it becomes legendary... This month, we explore some of the largest manga hits that just fall flat on their face in the home stretch. Join Gee and Ray as we spiral into the agony of what could have been.Follow Ray on her channel ⁠⁠Whimsical Pictures⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠And if you can't get enough of me, Gee, be sure to follow me on my ⁠⁠Youtube Channel⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠Twitter

With a busy Labor Day weekend ahead, Gee & Ursula share their travel plans / Seattle is one of the top 4 cities for crime in the country / A 14-year-old is accused of bringing a gun to Graham school / Over 100 dogs found living in an Auburn duplex, should the owner face criminal charges? // LGBT advocates claim Seattle worship group is using their platform to spread hate, should Seattle Mayor Harrell step in? // WE NEED TO TALK... about Labor Day weekend events!

Jel and Gee still can't shut up about Horse Girls, but we do find time to talk about all the other great anime happening right now.

De rode trui is weer voor Jonas Vingegaard, maar zijn ploeg Visma-Lease a Bike moest de zege in de ploegentijdrit aan UAE Team Emirates. Wat ging er mis bij de Nederlandse equipe? Of was de concurrentie gewoon te sterk? Niek Goedvolk bespreekt het met specialisten Roxane Knetemann en Marijn Abbenhuijs. Ook komt het pro-Palestijns protest aan bod, waar Israel-Premier Tech werd gehinderd. Hoe kan zoiets worden voorkomen? En is er wel een oplossing voor? Je hoort het in een nieuwe aflevering van In Het Wiel.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Zohran Mamdani is bad at lifting weights and should be embarrassed. At least Representative Eric Swalwell did a full rep. Disney recently bemoaned the lack of males in their audience. Gee. Wonder why they're losing the men. After seemingly fixing Washington, D.C. crime in a week, President Donald Trump suggested that maybe Chicago needs the law and order treatment. In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by President Donald J. Trump. He is the law.GUEST: Josh FirestineLink to today's sources: https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/sources-august-25-2025Buy the OG Mug Club Mug on Crowder Shop now! https://crowdershop.com/products/og-mug-club-mugLet my sponsor American Financing help you regain control of your finances. Go to https://americanfinancing.net/crowder or call 800-974-6500. NMLS 182334, http://nmlsconsumeraccess.org/DOWNLOAD THE RUMBLE APP TODAY: https://rumble.com/our-appsJoin Rumble Premium to watch this show every day! http://louderwithcrowder.com/PremiumGet your favorite LWC gear: https://crowdershop.com/Bite-Sized Content: https://rumble.com/c/CrowderBitsSubscribe to my podcast: https://rss.com/podcasts/louder-with-crowder/FOLLOW ME: Website: https://louderwithcrowder.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/scrowder Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/louderwithcrowder Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stevencrowderofficialMusic by @Pogo

URSULA'S TOP STORIES // Is school tougher on kids today? Or do we just forget what it was like for us? // Gee attended “READY DAY ONE!” over the weekend

Get Your SUPER-SUPPLIMENTS HERE: https://vni.life/wam Use Code WAM15 & Save 15%! Life changing formulas you can't find anywhere else! HELP SUPPORT US AS WE DOCUMENT HISTORY HERE: https://gogetfunding.com/help-keep-wam-alive/# GET NON-MRNA FREEZE DRIED MEAT HERE: https://wambeef.com/ Use code WAMBEEF to save 20%! GET HEIRLOOM SEEDS & NON GMO SURVIVAL FOOD HERE: https://heavensharvest.com/ USE Code WAM to save 5% plus free shipping! Josh Sigurdson reports on the Ghislaine Maxwell DOJ testimony just released where she claims Jeffrey Epstein was innocent, not an intelligence asset, Trump did nothing wrong and there is no list. Despite this coverup being blatantly obvious (perhaps the most blatant coverup in modern history), social media "influencers" are eating this up, as if a convicted trafficker like Maxwell is going to give them the truth, especially while asking for a full pardon. Maxwell whose father Robert Maxwell was an admitted Mossad agent claims that she and Jeffrey Epstein did not "knowingly" work with Mossad. Epstein had cameras in nearly every room and was clearly a blackmail agent. Trump has recently been claiming that those who talk about Epstein and want justice for thousands of children are "weaklings." After running on releasing "the files," Trump released the first phase of the Epstein files to pro Israel influencers earlier this year. The documents were TOTALLY redacted and blacked out. Then Pam Bondi claimed the documents are on her desk. Then she claimed they were lost. Then she claimed there never were any documents. Then Trump called the documents an Obama hoax against him despite the story being all over the news since 2009 and the initial investigations taking place under Bush. Then Trump signed the largest defense spending budget in history ($1 trillion) most of which went to helping Israel annex Palestine and target Iran. Gee , we can't imagine what happened there... This latest chapter is yet another example of the establishment telling us "there's nothing to see here" when there clearly is and hoping we all close our ears and mouthes and wander on forward blindly. Will you? Stay tuned for more from WAM! GET YOUR WAV WATCH HERE: https://buy.wavwatch.com/WAM Use Code WAM to save $100 and purchase amazing healing frequency technology! Get local, healthy, pasture raised meat delivered to your door here: https://wildpastures.com/promos/save-20-for-life/bonus15?oid=6&affid=321 USE THE LINK & get 20% off for life and $15 off your first box! DITCH YOUR DOCTOR! https://www.livelongerformula.com/wam Get a natural health practitioner and work with Christian Yordanov! Mention WAM and get a FREE masterclass! You will ALSO get a FREE metabolic function assessment! GET YOUR APRICOT SEEDS at the life-saving Richardson Nutritional Center HERE: https://rncstore.com/r?id=bg8qc1 Use code JOSH to save money! BUY GOLD HERE: https://firstnationalbullion.com/schedule-consult/ Avoid CBDCs! SIGN UP FOR HOMESTEADING COURSES NOW: https://freedomfarmers.com/link/17150/ Get Prepared & Start The Move Towards Real Independence With Curtis Stone's Courses! GET ORGANIC CHAGA MUSHROOMS HERE: https://alaskachaga.com/wam Use code WAM to save money! See shop for a wide range of products! GET AMAZING MEAT STICKS HERE: https://4db671-1e.myshopify.com/discount/WAM?rfsn=8425577.918561&utm_source=refersion&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=8425577.918561 USE CODE WAM TO SAVE MONEY! GET YOUR FREEDOM KELLY KETTLE KIT HERE: https://patriotprepared.com/shop/freedom-kettle/ Use Code WAM and enjoy many solutions for the outdoors in the face of the impending reset! PayPal: ancientwonderstelevision@gmail.com FIND OUR CoinTree page here: https://cointr.ee/joshsigurdson PURCHASE MERECHANDISE HERE: https://world-alternative-media.creator-spring.com/ JOIN US on SubscribeStar here: https://www.subscribestar.com/world-alternative-media For subscriber only content! Pledge here! Just a dollar a month can help us alive! https://www.patreon.com/user?u=2652072&ty=h&u=2652072 BITCOIN ADDRESS: 18d1WEnYYhBRgZVbeyLr6UfiJhrQygcgNU World Alternative Media 2025

In this week's mini episode, Madigan discusses Democratic Representative from Texas, Nicole Collier, spending the night in the House chambers in protest; Trump's sad attempt to create “peace” between Russia and Ukraine; the US government takeover in Washington D.C., and how it's affecting the city's unhoused community; and lastly, how a bunch of fragile football fans got their panties in a bunch about two new MALE cheerleaders on the Minnesota Vikings football team. Gee, they're more upset over this than the fact that their team hasn't been to the Super Bowl since 1977… Do you have a topic that you want the show to take on?    Email: neighborhoodfeminist@gmail.com Social media:     Instagram: @angryneighborhoodfeminist Get YANF Merch! ⁠⁠https://yanfpodcast.threadless.com/⁠⁠ JOIN ME ON PATREON!! ⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/angryneighborhoodfeminist⁠ Sources: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/19/trump-proposes-putin-zelenskyy-summit-in-push-to-end-ukraine-war https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn92e52rpjxo https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/14/politics/washington-dc-homeless-trump https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2x39d2jxvo https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/why-texas-democrat-nicole-collier-is-sleeping-at-the-state-capitol-after-refusing-to-submit-to-republican-demands-204742089.html https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/aug/19/male-cheerleaders-nfl-vikings https://www.today.com/news/sports/minnesota-vikings-male-cheerleaders-response-rcna225702 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

URSULA'S TOP STORIES: More Kroger stores closing // Gov. Ferguson responds to Pam Bondi's threats // Seattle is home to several drop-in choirs and Gee hates the idea // WE NEED TO TALK. . . About Seattle's drinking habits

Dr. Gee talks with his friend Dr. Audrey Mukwavi Matimelo about her passion for empowers others through the "Self Help Group Concept." Hear how this approach to maximize inherent gifts and talents for social and economic transformation, is not only needed in South Africa but also in the US where our systems are failing us. Dr. Audrey shares how this concept works at three levels, which are applicable in many contexts and has been influential in Dr. Gee's non-profit leadership. Don't miss this conversation with visionary leaders that partners across continents.  Dr. Audrey Mukwavi Matimelo has been working as a community development practitioner since 2005, and her work with the Self Help Group concept has enabled her to effectively mobilise and engage with groups of women, youth, and men for social and economic development. She is a passionate advocate of the Self Help Group concept, and has travelled to India, Kenya and Zimbabwe to implement and grow the idea. In 2001, Dr Audrey  got the opportunity to study community development. This led to her resigning her job after 10 years  in the banking industry to pursue studies in the United Kingdom and later in South Africa. Dr Audrey Matimelo has successfully completed her PhD in the school of Science and Agriculture, Rural Resource Management and was awarded a Doctorate Degree from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her thesis was on mobilizing rural assets for women empowerment. Her study explores various forms of poverty and focuses mainly on the Self Help Group concept and its impact among poor women of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Learn more about the Zimele Wethu Foundation alexgee.com Support the Show: patreon.com/blacklikeme Join the Black Like Me Listener Community Facebook Group

01. Lykke Li - I Follow Rivers (The Magician Remix) 02. Spit - Falling (Daddy's Groove Vocal Mix) 03. Planet Funk - Chase the Sun (Ivan Gough & Luke Chable Extended Remix) 04. Calvin Harris, Disciples - How Deep Is Your Love (Extended Mix) 05. Fragma - Toca Me (Inpetto 2008 Remix) 06. Tiesto, Sneaky Sound System - I Will Be Here (Wolfgang Gartner Remix) 07. Avicii - Levels (Original Mix) 08. Isidoros, Kosheen, Marten Lou - Hide U (Extended Mix) 09. Bob Sinclar - World Hold On feat. Steve Edwards, Vintage Culture, Dubdogz (Vintage Culture & Dubdogz Remix, Extended Mix) 10. Yves Larock, Steff Da Campo, Jaba - Rise Up 2021 (feat. Jaba) (Extended Mix) 11. Fatboy Slim - Right Here, Right Now (CamelPhat Remix) 12. Jefferson Airplane x Killteq - Somebody 2 Love 13. J.ROPERO, DTM x AOKI, MT11 - Coracao Homies 14. MIKA - Relax 15. FISHER (OZ) - Losing It (Extended) 16. LittGloss - Milkshake (Extended Mix) 17. Outwork, Mr. Gee, Dynoro - Elektro (Extended Mix) 18. Masters At Work - Work (No Hopes, Kofa & Lebedeff Remix) 19. David Guetta, La Bouche, Hypaton - Be My Lover (2023 Mix - Extended Mix) 20. CamelPhat, Elderbrook, ARTBAT - Cola (ARTBAT Extended Remix) 21. Energy 52 - Cafe Del Mar (Tale Of Us Renaissance Remix) (Original Mix) 22. Ultra Nate, Pete Tong, Jules Buckley, LP Giobbi - Free (Do What U Want) (LP Giobbi Club Edit) 23. Swedish House Mafia - One (Original Mix) 24. Andrew Meller - Born Slippy (Reincarnation Mix) 25. Martin Garrix - Animals (Original Mix)

01. Lykke Li - I Follow Rivers (The Magician Remix) 02. Spit - Falling (Daddy's Groove Vocal Mix) 03. Planet Funk - Chase the Sun (Ivan Gough & Luke Chable Extended Remix) 04. Calvin Harris, Disciples - How Deep Is Your Love (Extended Mix) 05. Fragma - Toca Me (Inpetto 2008 Remix) 06. Tiesto, Sneaky Sound System - I Will Be Here (Wolfgang Gartner Remix) 07. Avicii - Levels (Original Mix) 08. Isidoros, Kosheen, Marten Lou - Hide U (Extended Mix) 09. Bob Sinclar - World Hold On feat. Steve Edwards, Vintage Culture, Dubdogz (Vintage Culture & Dubdogz Remix, Extended Mix) 10. Yves Larock, Steff Da Campo, Jaba - Rise Up 2021 (feat. Jaba) (Extended Mix) 11. Fatboy Slim - Right Here, Right Now (CamelPhat Remix) 12. Jefferson Airplane x Killteq - Somebody 2 Love 13. J.ROPERO, DTM x AOKI, MT11 - Coracao Homies 14. MIKA - Relax 15. FISHER (OZ) - Losing It (Extended) 16. LittGloss - Milkshake (Extended Mix) 17. Outwork, Mr. Gee, Dynoro - Elektro (Extended Mix) 18. Masters At Work - Work (No Hopes, Kofa & Lebedeff Remix) 19. David Guetta, La Bouche, Hypaton - Be My Lover (2023 Mix - Extended Mix) 20. CamelPhat, Elderbrook, ARTBAT - Cola (ARTBAT Extended Remix) 21. Energy 52 - Cafe Del Mar (Tale Of Us Renaissance Remix) (Original Mix) 22. Ultra Nate, Pete Tong, Jules Buckley, LP Giobbi - Free (Do What U Want) (LP Giobbi Club Edit) 23. Swedish House Mafia - One (Original Mix) 24. Andrew Meller - Born Slippy (Reincarnation Mix) 25. Martin Garrix - Animals (Original Mix)

Trump & Zelensky meet at the WH // Gee & Ursula's takeaways on Trump's diplomacy // SCENARIOS!

Today, we're diving into the wild world of home maintenance, specifically why you might want to think twice before picking up that pressure washer from your local hardware store. Spoiler alert: you might just blow a hole in your siding or create a new water feature in your living room. I know, shocking, right? With the rising home improvement costs, folks are scrambling to maintain their homes instead of shelling out for a new roof or siding—who can afford that? So, we chat with Evan Greco from Rolling Suds about the surprisingly nuanced art of soft washing versus the good old-fashioned pressure wash—because trust me, not all washing is created equal. By the end of this episode, you'll be wondering why you ever thought DIY was a good idea—let the pros handle it, people! Home improvement isn't just about slapping paint on the walls and calling it a day. In this episode, Eric G. dives into the swirling vortex of home maintenance and the rising trend of soft washing, a gentler alternative to the high-pressure power washing that can wreak havoc on our beloved homes. With Evan Greco from Rolling Suds, Eric tackles the common misconceptions about DIY pressure washing—spoiler alert: it's not as easy as it looks! They reveal the dark side of homeowners taking matters into their own hands and ending up with more damage than dirt to show for it. Plus, they explore the reasons why folks are now more inclined to invest in their current homes rather than jumping ship to chase cheaper interest rates elsewhere. This episode is packed with practical tips and eye-opening revelations about the hidden costs of neglecting proper home maintenance, all served with a side of sarcasm that keeps things light despite the serious subject matter. So, if you're thinking about cleaning up your act—literally—this episode is a must-listen. Have you ever looked at your house and thought, 'Gee, that could use a good scrub'? If so, you're not alone. Eric and Evan discuss how soft washing is taking the home maintenance world by storm, especially in areas where traditional pressure washing is a disaster waiting to happen. They delve into the nitty-gritty of why soft washing is the way to go, especially for older homes that might crumble under the pressure of a standard power washer. They also touch on the rise of home values and how homeowners are forced to become more proactive about maintaining their properties. It's a wake-up call for anyone who thinks a quick DIY job will suffice. Spoiler alert: it won't! The guys also share stories about the shocking things they've found while cleaning homes—from moldy roofs to neglected sidings that could tell stories if only they could speak. Trust me, you don't want to miss this episode if you care about your home (and your sanity). Let's face it, homeownership can be a bit of a nightmare. One minute you're enjoying your cozy abode, and the next you're knee-deep in cleaning supplies, trying to figure out what went wrong with your latest DIY attempt. In this episode, Eric G. and Evan Greco take a humorous look at the chaos that ensues when homeowners try to save a buck by going the DIY route with pressure washers. Spoiler alert: it usually ends in tears (and a lot of regret). They discuss the rising trend of soft washing and why it's becoming a favorite among homeowners who want to maintain the beauty of their homes without the risk of turning their siding into Swiss cheese. You'll hear wild tales about the things people have tried to clean with a pressure washer and the hilarious (and sometimes tragic) results. If you own a home and think you can handle everything with a rented power washer, you might want to tune in to this episode first. Eric and Evan's witty banter makes this episode not just informative but also a total joy to listen to.Takeaways: Home improvement is all about maintaining your biggest asset, which is your house, so don't neglect it! DIY pressure washing

Send us a textOkay, so here's the story: Take a beloved children's character, add a bumbling robot, an alien prince, put them on the run, and then scratch your head because that all sounds like word salad. Look, just come with me on the journey, I guarantee it will be rewarding. And heart-warming. And family friendly. And no bitch jokes.               Here now is the story of how this bonkers/canine show came to Saturday Morning.              Who are Higgins and Benjean?              Did this show rub shoulders with “Saturday Night Live”?               Is there really a serious biographical profile of Benji in this episode?     All these questions, and more, will be answered in this look at BENJI, ZAX & THE ALIEN PRINCE! Thanks for ‘tooning in.  Share With Us: SatMornPod@hotmail.comBluesky: @SatMornPodYouTube Us: tinyurl.com/yyhpwjeo (Don't waste your time)   Featured Music:“Nostalgic Happy Music” by AudioJungle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxSUR6MQhw&t=2s “Happy Life” by Fredji - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzQiRABVARk Various Music by Oneul - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by302C2YhxY “I Feel You” by Kevin MacLeod” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw8E3jjbUCE “Nostalgic” by OrangeHead - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wExcRoNNzAc “Breakfast Club” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Spi22l3m5I “Horizons” by Atch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-u53MADIag “80's Hijack” by Gee - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndVqzJ9Lk6M&t=26s “Synthmania” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6r20TKnA6M “United” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArjGQFCcHxA “Cool Blue” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp5cxZWP-wc   #ABC #NBC #CBS #The80s #80s #cartoons #cartoon #animation #SaturdayMorning #1980 #1981 #1982 #1983 #1984 #1985 #1986 #1987 #1988 #1989 #Filmation #HannaBarbera #DePatieFreleng #RubySpears #Disney #Superheroes 

Gee & Ursula respond to listeners re: our interview with Jesus // AGREE TO DISAGREE: Family lanes & crying babies // WE HEAR YOU! and WORDS TO LIVE BY

Brian, Blake, and Richard are back for Episode 578 of the Chasing Tone Podcast - Tascam style pre-amp pedals, the future of guitar gear, and the guys set a new recordBrian open's the episode with a little education on the Tascam 424 sound and the work of Mk.Gee as we take a very brief look at the new release from JHS. Richard is disappointed he didn't guess the teaser riddle and is dazzled by a revelation from the past.Would you watch Ai generated gear review videos?  According to a new report, 9 out of 100 of the biggest growing YouTube channels is generated entirely by Ai and the guys discuss what this means for the future of our industry. This moves on to a discussion about the future of guitar equipment.Brian makes a confession about a potential crime he committed in the past and how the police got called on him. Have you ever built your own amp? Richard mulls it over and Blake tells him about a mutual friend's DIY build.Clarksdale, Brian's shiny trousers, Elastic trickery, COPS, Nickelback...it's all in this week's Chasing Tone!We are on Patreon now too!Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/chasingtonepodcast)Awesome Courses, Merch and DIY mods:https://www.guitarpedalcourse.com/https://www.wamplerdiy.com/Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/@chasingtonepodcastFind us at:https://www.wamplerpedals.com/https://www.instagram.com/WamplerPedals/https://www.facebook.com/groups/wamplerfanpage/Contact us at: podcast@wamplerpedals.comSupport the show

SEASON: 5 EPISODE: 25Episode Overview:Welcome back to the Becoming Preferred podcast, where we bring you the insights you need to stand out from the competition and thrive. Today, we have an incredible guest who has not only witnessed but actively shaped the evolution of marketing over the last few decades. From the very early days of the internet our guest has been at the forefront, adapting and innovating.He's Gee Ranasinha, the CEO of KEXINO, an award-winning marketing agency that has been the secret weapon for over 400 startups and small businesses across 20 countries. Gee and his team help these businesses achieve the holy grail of success: growing awareness, reputation, trust and sales.Prepare to extract some serious wisdom from a seasoned pro who understands exactly what it takes to become preferred in today's complex market. Join me for my conversation with Gee Ranasinha. Guest Bio: Gee has been in marketing since the days of dial-up internet and AOL CDs. Today, he's the CEO of KEXINO, an award-winning marketing agency. Over the past 16 years KEXINO has helped over 400 startups and small businesses in around 20 countries grow awareness, reputation, trust – and sales.A Fellow of the Chartered Institute Of Marketing, Gee is also Visiting Professor at two business schools, teaching Marketing and Behavioral Economics to final-year MBA students.Outside of work Gee loves to cook, listens to music on a ridiculously expensive hi-fi, and plays jazz piano very badly.Resource Links:Website: https://kexino.com/Product Link: https://kexino.com/services/marketing/Insight Gold Timestamps:05:50 A differentiator at the beginning was that we would lead with a business problem08:43 Nothing every dies, it just gets fragmented11:04 The vast majority of our total addressable market is not ready to buy at that exact specific time13:47 The marketers of their day understood how we as buyers considered and remembered brands at the point of purchase15:00 Thinking Fast and Slow18:49 One of the biggest obstacles we face is ignorance of what marketing is21:11 Nobody spent any time on the single biggest factor of any website that drives conversion25:08 The reason it sounds too good to be true is because it is too good to be true29:18 A thing called the 'sunk cost fallacy'31:54 Price isn't necessarily the deciding factor, as how buyers perceive value34:20 I would say the lion's share of the reason why a B2B sale happens is not because you are selling the best product...37:34 The biggest competition is sometimes is not doing anything38:51 Four words: Talk to your customers!39:08 Our customers are our biggest advocates40:30 A fantastic question to ask an existing customer...42:01 The best way people can find you if they wanna reach out to you is kexino.comConnect Socially:LinkedIn:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposts video of pastors saying women shouldn't vote / Trump deploys National Guard in DC / Graffiti violations are up in Everett, Gee and Ursula feel differently on the topic // The 4th trauma response: people pleasing // SCENARIOS!

Gee shares his top highlights from last night's Seattle Seahawks match / Eight landlords penalized for violating rent cap law / Tacoma looking to use AI to track recycling // Katrina Guishard joins us to chat about how AI is impacting parenting // Gee and Angela both witness physical altercations at the football game

URSULA'S TOP STORIES: Shootings in Seattle, but gun violence is down // WA saw biggest construction job loss in U.S. over past year // The middle class is disappearing in Seattle // Microsoft's pay scale leaked // What is the REAL Seattle? // WE NEED TO TALK. . . About a special event Gee attended over the weekend

Send us a textOkay, so here's the story: A band of people and their dog hit the open road to tour and help people along the way. No, it's not a Scooby-Doo show. I swear it's not. But it's sort of a Scooby prequel.               Here now is the story of how this rock n roll show came to Saturday Morning.              Where did this show come from?               Can dogs play the drums?              Was Meatballs a surrogate for Meatloaf?     All these questions, and more, will be answered in this look at MEATBALLS & SPAGHETTI! One-two-three-four! Thanks for ‘tooning in.  Share With Us: SatMornPod@hotmail.comBluesky: @SatMornPodYouTube Us: tinyurl.com/yyhpwjeo (Don't waste your time)   Featured Music:“Nostalgic Happy Music” by AudioJungle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxSUR6MQhw&t=2s “Happy Life” by Fredji - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzQiRABVARk Various Music by Oneul - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by302C2YhxY “I Feel You” by Kevin MacLeod” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw8E3jjbUCE “Nostalgic” by OrangeHead - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wExcRoNNzAc “Breakfast Club” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Spi22l3m5I “Horizons” by Atch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-u53MADIag “80's Hijack” by Gee - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndVqzJ9Lk6M&t=26s “Synthmania” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6r20TKnA6M “United” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArjGQFCcHxA “Cool Blue” by Vodovoz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp5cxZWP-wc   #ABC #NBC #CBS #The80s #80s #cartoons #cartoon #animation #SaturdayMorning #1980 #1981 #1982 #1983 #1984 #1985 #1986 #1987 #1988 #1989 #Filmation #HannaBarbera #DePatieFreleng #RubySpears #Disney #Superheroes 

Dr. Gee talks to returning guest Dr. Chris Bass about the mourning process of losing his mother over the previous year. They talk about the need for rest and space in mourning in order to have the energy to focus on the work that would have made his mother proud. Hear about the activities and accomplishments that honor his mother going forward.  Dr. Bass gives advice for making sure people take time and space for healthy relationships and themselves. They discuss the unique times that Blacks folks in particular are facing with the challenges in our culture and society.  Dr. Chris Bass has served clinically in a variety of posts including; Clinical Director at a residential treatment facility for adjudicated late adolescent males, Psychologist for the City of Atlanta and Senior Psychological Partner at The Bass Medical and Psychological Consultants firm LLC. He has held faculty appointments on the campuses of Hampton University, Morehouse College, University of Georgia, Oglethorpe University and others. He continues to serve as a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Clark Atlanta University. alexgee.com Support the Show: patreon.com/blacklikeme Join the Black Like Me Listener Community Facebook Group

On this episode of Million Dollaz Worth of Game, we welcome back family to the show, EST Gee. With four appearances, Gee has the most interviews on MDWOG and every time he pulls up, he drops real game. We dive into his evolution as an artist, how he's holding up mentally, and the creative process behind his brand-new album “My World” — streaming everywhere now. Gee gets personal about his journey, growth, and what it means to represent his city at this stage in his career. RIP EST Big Beach & EST Lu Mike Featuring: Ariel Pryor (@thearielpryor) - 21 y/o 7 Figure Business Owner Founder Of The AP University Free Masterclass Teach you how to make 10K monthly w/ digital products and marketing. Head to www.buildabosschallenge.com or TEXT BOSS to 844-435-4722 Powered by: New Amsterdam Vodka - Find your wins with New Amsterdam Vodka Draftkings - GAMBLING PROBLEM? CALL 1-800-GAMBLER, (800) 327-5050 or visit gamblinghelplinema.org (MA). Call 877-8-HOPENY/text HOPENY (467369) (NY). Please Gamble Responsibly. 888-789-7777/visit ccpg.org (CT), or visit www.mdgamblinghelp.org (MD). 21+ and present in most states. (18+ DC/KY/NH/WY). Void in ONT/OR/NH. Eligibility restrictions apply. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino & Resort (KS). 1 per new customer. Must register new account to receive reward Token. Must select Token BEFORE placing min. $5 bet to receive $300 in Bonus Bets if your bet wins. Min. -500 odds req. Token and Bonus Bets are single-use and non-withdrawable. Token expires 6/22. Bonus Bets expire in 7 days (168 hours). Stake removed from payout. Terms: sportsbook.draftkings.com/promos. Ends 6/22/25 at 11:59 PM ET. Sponsored by DK. Jackpocket - GAMBLING PROBLEM? CALL 1-800-GAMBLER, Call 877-8-HOPENY/text HOPENY (467369) (NY). 18+ (19+ in NE, 21+ in AZ). Physically present where Jackpocket operates. Jackpocket is a lottery courier and not affiliated with any State Lottery. Eligibility restrictions apply. Void where prohibited. 1 per new customer. Opt-in for $5 in non-withdrawable Lottery Credits that expire in 7 days (168 hours). Ends 8/31/25 at 11:59PM ET. Terms: jkpt.co/draw5. Based on 2025 iOS download data collected by Sensor Tower. Sponsored by JackpocketYou can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/mworthofgame

Your husband's old sexual assault charges surfaced on your birthday, revealing secret children and ending in domestic violence. It's Feedback Friday!And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com. Now let's dive in!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1171On This Week's Feedback Friday:For the love of all that's disinfected and holy, when you need to get from Point A to Point B, please don't be the kind of traveler who winds up featured on the Passenger Shaming Instagram account.Your perfect 39th birthday shattered when police called about your husband's 20-year-old sexual assault charges. He "remembered" details, revealed a secret child, then threw you across the room during a toddler tantrum. How did one call destroy everything, and where do you go from here?Your friend Mike's ex-roommate Sam has gone full scorched-earth with wild accusations ranging from illegal recording to height-shaming. Sam's pushing for church discipline against Mike, talks about suicide, and owns guns. You're caught in the middle trying to help while wondering if this unstable situation will explode. What's the right move here?You've become family with elderly Helen next door, who promised you her house when she passes. But now a pushy couple from her rehab has swooped in, changed her will, installed cameras, and made themselves the new executors. They're buying her gadgets she doesn't want and won't leave her alone. Are they genuine helpers or predators circling their prey?Recommendation of the Week: Clean your room (or even just a corner of it)!You were photoshopping a passport photo in your sweltering truck when flamboyant "Gee Gee" approached, insisting you should be a model in shoots with "hot women." His business card led to a sketchy hair salon website from the early 2000s and a house worth $600k. Everyone thinks he's a trafficker, but the FBI seemed dismissive. Gee, what's Gee Gee really up to?Have any questions, comments, or stories you'd like to share with us? Drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com!Connect with Jordan on Twitter at @JordanHarbinger and Instagram at @jordanharbinger.Connect with Gabriel on Twitter at @GabeMizrahi and Instagram @gabrielmizrahi.And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors:BetterHelp: 10% off first month: betterhelp.com/jordanDeleteMe: 20% off: joindeleteme.com/jordan, code JORDANHomes.com: Find your home: homes.comAudible: Visit audible.com/jhs or text JHS to 500-500Airbnb: airbnb.com/hostSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.