Podcasts about Great Depression

Episode Summary Janet and Margaret talk about sustainable foraging, herbalism, wild tending, constructive ethics on why you might choose not to wildcraft, ways to impact your food intake in small but meaningful ways, unlearning extractive tendencies when harvesting food and medicine, and upholding indigenous wisdom around wild tending. Guest Info Janet (she/her) is an herbalist and teacher at the Terra Sylva School of Botanical Medicine. Janet can be found on wordpress at Radical Vitalism The school can be found on Instagram @terrasylvaschool. Janet does a podcast called The Book on Fire. Janet recommends reading The Honorable Harvest by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Host Info Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Janet on Sustainable Foraging Margaret 00:14 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today, Margaret Killjoy. And this week we're going to be talking about herbalism and foraging and sustainable foraging of herbalism, and forage....[Trails off] That's what we're gonna be talking about with with Janet Kent, who you all have heard from before on another episode from a long time ago, about herbalism. And I think you'll all get a lot out of this episode. But first, this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network. Margaret 01:12 And we're back. Okay, so Janet, if you could introduce yourself with your name, which I guess I already said, and your pronouns and kind of what you do for a living as, which would help people understand why they should listen to you about this topic. Janet 01:44 I am Janet Kent, my pronouns are she/her. I run a school of botanical medicine that's located about an hour outside of Asheville, in southern Appalachia, and in so called Western North Carolina. And I'm also a clinical herbalist. And I also live in hardwood co [conifer] forest. And so I'm surrounded by wild plants. And specifically, like this region of southern Appalachia has a long history of settler wild crafting as a kind of hustle. And there were a lot of...when most pharmaceuticals came out of plants back in the day, this was a huge nexus of harvesting and distributing, and people extracted a lot of plants from the wild as a means of survival and sold them to the pharmaceutical companies. So, that is partially because this is a really ecologically rich place. But, I say all that just to say that I'm surrounded by plants that have medicinal value, even in like the larger market outside of the home forager or home apothecary. So, it's something that like, we have to really think about here and are forced to. Even though we're surrounded by the medicine, the ethics of that are something that I think about pretty regularly. So, I might be better situated than some to consider that. Yeah, Margaret 03:13 Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And that's why I wanted to have you on to talk today, right? Because I feel like this is this question that is coming up more and more as foraging becomes a little bit more mainstream. Or? Well, I guess, actually, to start with, we were talking earlier, and you talked about how there's sort of a foraging craze that's coming from the pandemic, I was wondering if you could kind of talk about that, like what's happening right now in foraging? 03:38 Yeah, I mean, while I do think there was a much more of a burst during the pandemic, when people were getting outside more. Public spaces, and parks became more visited once they were open again. And you saw just a lot more people out. I don't know, like how much time you spend in public spaces. But, there was a huge increase in people national parks, and national forests, State Forest, all of those kinds of places. And even just in city parks and such. And I think that there has been a lot of social media content that's being created around foraging. And it is like a way that people can get excited about gathering their own food. It can be a really nice, like gateway to like relationships with plants, because people start to learn to identify plants and learn what is food. And I definitely think that there's no small part of this that is also connected to people wanting to spend less money on food. I mean, we have applicants for school sometimes even say, you know, like, I want to learn more about plants that are useful for food and for medicine, because I need to spend less money. So there's like an economic incentive here, as well. And I should probably spend some time on that in a bit. But, also I would just say that over the last...I don't know, it's probably been more than a decade, there has just been a surge in interest in wild plants, including for food and for medicine. Margaret 05:10 Yeah. And that's either really good or really bad depending on who you ask, Is that what's Is that what's happening right now? Janet 05:19 Yeah, I would say that there can be pretty binary of viewpoints on this. And it's interesting, I mean, something that you probably see with a lot of people that you interview or with different communities that you might be in as there is a rise in awareness of just the colonial project that we're all part of still. And so that this is still occupied territory. There are indigenous people here whose land settlers are occupying. There is a certain level of guilt that can come with that awareness...[interrupted] Margaret 05:56 Right? Janet 05:56 [Continues] If you are someone who is not indigenous to turtle islands, and the way that I see that play out sometimes, not always, is with people sometimes seeing kind of stark black and white ideas around what is good and what is not good, and relationship. And we see people who hear like, "We shouldn't wildcraft," or they memorize like this all wildcrafting, which is the word that herbalist and people who are into plant medicine will use to describe harvesting herbs for medicine specifically. I don't actually hear 'wildcrafting' used to refer to food. Yeah, but so wildcrafting can be seen as strictly extractive and people just taking from the wild, because as I mentioned in the introduction, there is a long history of plants being taken en mass from the forests, to serve the pharmaceutical industry. And even now, there are certain plants that are threatened and endangered because they are used, even in European markets. Margaret 07:03 Like what? Janet 07:05 Black cohosh, specifically, is an herb that is seen as being helpful for some menopausal states. And it's used in...So in Europe, it's more license legal to be a doctor who uses plant medicine. And so you can prescribe herbs there. It's more regulated as well, but definitely tons of black cohosh are sent abroad every year. And from what...I met someone who works, is sort of like from a root digging family, like a traditional Appalachian root digging family, but she said she'd been in warehouses where there was just like piles of rotting roots of black cohosh, you know, cause people... Margaret 07:48 Oh, God. Janet 07:48 Yeah, the work of, as in is usually the case, like the piece workers, the people who are gathering are paid shit. And then the stuff is piled up. It's not stored very well. Some fraction of it will make it into medicine. And so there is very much a problem with extraction en masse of plants, especially when the root is what's being harvested, because that kills the plant. Right? Margaret 08:12 Yeah. Ginseng is like one that I feel like I hear about too. Janet 08:16 Absolutely. Ginseng would be a great example. And interestingly, I mean, you may even live in ginseng country. I do, for sure. But, that's something that's, you know, has been historically, as settlers came into these mountains, have shipped abroad, because by the time the Revolutionary War happened here, already, there was a dearth of ginseng in China because so much had been wild harvested, and they hadn't really put in cultivation yet. And so, as soon as the global market, people within the global market figured out that there was a similar ginseng here, they started shipping it abroad, and actually ginseng sales helped pay for the Revolutionary War. Margaret 09:02 Oh, god. Uh huh. Janet 09:03 Which is just so wild. Yes. So, there is very much history of extraction of plants. Margaret 09:10 Yeah. For the extractive project that is the Revolutionary War Janet 09:14 Yes, absolutely, a huge scale. So, when we are thinking about our own personal use or serving our communities or, you know, a lot of people will try to make herbal products as a side hustle, then we do need to confront our personal relationship with that legacy. That's obviously really important. However, the amount of time and energy people spent in policing other people's foraging and wildcrafting is a lot, as you may imagine. Margaret 09:42 Yeah, social media is particularly good at getting us to level our weapons at each other. Yeah. Janet 09:48 Right. So, we see a lot of that, and I feel like the the climate has not been very nuanced for this conversation, because what's true, and this is probably a part of what you're wanting to get out with this episode is that there's a really big difference between digging up a 15 year old root of a plant in the forest that took that long to get that big and taking the whole root and killing it, than there is actually harvesting weeds or harvesting invasive plants or plants that are here in abundance. And actually, you can harvest some kinds of plants in a way that is supportive to the plant community that they live in, because they're opportunistic or taking too much space. And so, I think when we have a black and white rubric around this, and much like all wildcrafting is extractive, we're also forgetting that there is a way for humans to be in relationship with plant communities in a way that fosters diversity and richness in the ecology. And can be a form of wild tending. And that is how Turtle Island was maintained by all of the indigenous folks who are living in so many different plant communities around the continent before Europeans showed up and disrupted that. Margaret 11:04 Okay, so what are some of the...I like, examples. It makes it really more concrete in my head. Like, what are some of the examples of plants that you're helping that plant community by foraging or or by? Yeah. Janet 11:17 Okay. Yeah, that's, that's a good question. And there's, I'll share with you a book, there's a whole book on invasive plant medicines. And so I'm going to say 'invasive' here, I know that that's a controversial word to some people. But, what I mean is plants that came after 1492, and are opportunistic and can take over spaces, and take up space. So, that's what I mean when I'm saying that, and we can say 'non native' or 'invasive' or just 'opportunistic,' but I'm gonna say 'weedy' and 'abundant' plants here. Plantain would be a weedy and abundant plant, and mugwort can be quite opportunistic, and take over in some places. Mimosa tree, the really beautiful pink firecracker looking tree that grows in the southeast pretty abundantly is pretty opportunistic. It can take over spaces for sure, you know, and sometimes native plants are also pretty weedy as well. Yarrow is a plant that comes from Europe, that there are some native varieties too, but they tend to not be as opportunistic. A lot of garden plants that have escaped, like catnip or horehound you might find in other places, sometimes lemon balm goes feral, in some places, as well. So, those would be some examples. But, a lot of trees that you see...[corrects self ] well, it's hard to say...Trees that were planted for landscaping, and then kind of move out like, Tree of Heaven is an example. There's a lot of different trees that got brought in at various points that have spread out and can really out compete other trees. Yeah. Margaret 12:57 This is really interesting to me for a lot of reasons...I mean, I'm kind of notoriously bad for someone who like often lives off grid or like, you know, I live mostly alone on a bunch of acres in a mountain or whatever in Appalachia. And I'm like, kind of notoriously bad at actually knowing the plants around me and how to engage with them besides being like, I swear, one year, I'm gonna be here in the fall and eat the acorns. You know, has been my plan for however many years. I've done every step of acorn harvesting at various points and never actually finished it and eaten them. But, so it's just, it's kind of interesting to me because as I walk around, you know, the place that I live, I become more and more familiar with some of these plants and it's interesting to think about them in different ways. And then also think about, like, whether or not I have a desire or like, a role in sort of shaping what plants grow around me. And like, I don't even know the answer that yet. Like, I mean, what I sort of in my head, I'm like, I believe both the pines and the Oaks near me are fairly, you know, native to this area, or whatever. But, I'm like, but I like the Oaks more. And so I'm like, Is it bad to start, like, kind of cutting back the pines and like trying to propagate more of the Oaks? Like, maybe the tree level is a higher level of thinking about because they take a lot longer, but is that something that like, people should be doing in the kinds of....should be is a weird question....but [people] could think about doing in the places that they forage or, like thinking about what the current plant environment community is and what it could be shifted towards? Or is that like, do you stay out of it? This is not a question. Sorry. Janet 14:39 Yeah, no, I, I think I can pick the through line in there, which is that: what would a good relationship look like when foraging? And to me, you know, I wasn't taught this way at all. I definitely came up in herbalism when this was not part of our conversation. But, I think in general, wild tending is the way to go where you actually have a perennial relationship with the plants that you live around or the plants that you visit, or the places that you'd like to harvest so that you can pay attention to when they're healthy and when they need support. See which plants are taking up some more space, you know, I mean, depending on what pines you're around, you know, those would have at one time been controlled partially through fire management practices, because they burn more than oaks. So, you know, that's like...I mean, not that we're trying to like, go back to some pristine era, because that's not possible. There's just sort of moving forward from where we're at. But, but it is true that in a lot of places where there were mixed forest in that way, there would be periodic fire for....support hunting, which would have taken out the pine. I mean, I think that personally, preferential treatment of different plant communities and landscapes feels pretty intuitive. And also, if you look back through history, but also if you just look at different cultures that are living in a sort of a tending/stewardship relationship with the plants around them, there is usually preferential management practice, which that's kind of like a boring way to say it, but yes, like favoring the plants you would like to see do better and favoring plants often that are useful to humans, and wildlife. You know, before the American Chestnuts went through, they're blight, they're not extinct, there are still a few left, but before the chestnut blight took out such a large amount of the chestnut trees on the eastern coast that was the dominant tree. And yes, they were taller and larger than most of the trees in the forest, but there was a level of preference for those because they made tons of food every year. And so humans and birds and other animals that like chestnuts, propagated the chestnuts by moving them around, even a squirrel burying a bunch of chestnuts is going to make more chestnuts come up, you know? So I think that that is a pretty natural way to relate to the plants around you, which is to favor some over others, you know. And when you start to pay attention to like, who's just kind of taken over, which can be plants that are actually from here too. And you want....ecosystem's tend to benefit from number of connections and number of members. And so you want to see richness in both of those numbers. You want to see more members and you want to see more connections. So, when you have any one member dominating, you're having less of both. And I think if we can think of tending towards, you know, the word diversity is almost destroyed at this point for usefulness, however, I could say that ecologically, what I mean is like, yes, strengthen members and connections. Margaret 17:57 Okay. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. I don't know, I've been really enjoying just like, you know, I have a dog now. So, I have to walk around a lot. And actually, like, pay more attention, because he's always like finding all of the things and making me pay attention to it. I don't know where I'm going with that. There's cactus where I live. And it confuses the hell out of me. Yeah, I live in West Virginia. Janet 18:21 Are they prickly pears? Margaret 18:24 I don't know. They're small. They're like low to the ground. They're like big, round, green lobes kind of like hanging out on the ground. There's not a lot of them. But, it confuses the hell out of me. I have no idea if they're native to this area or not. I don't understand. I don't know why I'm telling you that. Now everyone knows I have cactus. Janet 18:51 Dogs are wonderful for getting us out of the house and out into the world, you know, and then you start to pay attention to who else is around, you know, the dog leads you to the others. Right? Margaret 19:00 Yeah, totally. It's how I know about all the turtles on the property is my dog finds them in and hangs out with them and just sort of stares at them. And then I watch them. Janet 19:07 Are they box turtles? Margaret 19:08 Yeah, there's some kind of. Yeah, I think they're box turtles. They're not, uh, they're not doing so well. I looked them up. There's not a lot of them. But, I live somewhere where there's not a lot of roads. So they don't die as much. Janet 19:22 Right. I love box turtles. I actually wanted to bring up a different similar creature when I was thinking about this topic earlier, which is that I think that, while I can be like, it's all you know, 'we need to turn relationships, we need to be stewarding land,' all of these things, it is worth noting that generally, wildlife and plant communities are under pressure when people get hungry. And you know, I was in Florida near some of the beautiful springs down there a few years ago, and I've also seen these In parts of the Gulf South, but there are these really cool tortoises called gopher tortoises. Have you ever met one of those? Margaret 20:05 No, Janet 20:07 They're kind of big. I just realized I'm using my hands and you're able to see my hands on the podcast. However, they're pretty big turtles.Tortoises. And, they're so cool. One of the things they do is they make these burrows That's why they're called gopher tortoises, but they help a lot of different creatures survive hurricane flooding and other like vast flooding, because other animals will hang out in their burrows. They're like, wombats or something. They're like a helper species that makes habitat for other animals. But, I was reading about them when I was down there and in the Great Depression, the locals down on the Gulf South and in Florida, called them Hoover Chickens. Because they were naming after present President Hoover, who they were blaming for the Great Depression and just got....because they eating so many tortoises to survive, okay, and the tortoise population just like dropped out during that time, and they're slowly getting back, but they have a hard time too, like the box turtles that we live near. And so when I read that I just, it made me really...it made me think about foraging honestly, and how much I had seen this like uptick, with the economic dip, and made me just understand the level to which we need to be emphasizing what's abundant. And what you know...a tortoise....Tortoises are not abundant. They were not abundant even back then, probably. But like, what species are there a lot of? Which species does harvesting actually help the larger plant community? But, also with individual species, there's plants where if you harvest in a specific way that helps propagate them, then you can help increase their numbers as well. And that's going to differ from plant to plant. But, I think that what I would like to see with people getting more and more excited about foraging and wild harvesting of herbs in general, is that actual consciousness about what it is to help their numbers grow so that it's not as much of an extract of relationship? Margaret 22:14 Yeah, no, I remember reading one of the things that like really stuck with me, I read a long time ago, it was about how during the Great Depression, like squirrels and deer were hunted to near extinction in various places. And like.... Janet 22:29 Wow Margaret 22:29 Yeah, exactly. And, you know, these are the things when I think of abundant animals, right, I think of deer and squirrels, at least where I live. And, and so that, that realization that we actually have an impact, you know. Like, the small amounts of destructive things we do really can add up. Obviously, we're living through a, you know, climate level of all of that coming. But no, that's, that's makes me sad about the tortoises. But okay, so So what are some examples then of these? I know I just keeping like, give me more examples, because I like the stories of it. But like, what are some of the plants that you're like helping? I can imagine, for example, like, I mean, obviously, chestnuts are very complicated right now. But, you know, harvesting chestnuts, of course, doesn't necessarily negatively impact the tree. And earlier you were talking about basically being like roots are like much more complicated to extract, or there are like ways of extracting roots that are less bad? Would you mostly say to anyone listening to this unless you know, better just don't mess with roots and work on some other stuff? Janet 23:39 Yeah, you know, and actually, you're reminding me that when I have been seeing a lot of like, more like virally popular foragers, they don't tend to emphasize roots, which I feel grateful for. And yeah, I would say that in general, unless you have a perennial relationship with a plant community than just staying away from roots is a good idea. But with a lot of plants, there are ways to harvest where you're not actually greatly impacting the plant. Let me think of some examples of that. I mean, I almost don't want to bring up ramps because they are so over harvested in some places. Those are wild leeks for people who might not know, but what is true is that if instead of harvesting the bulb, the white bulb, it's kind of like an onion, garlicky thing and each can just take a leaf and harvest leaves from a big patch instead of digging them up that's gonna make a huge difference. Now when you see restaurants start saw offer foragers money for ramps, at least in my neighborhood, I started to see much more like big holes dug where they're just digging up clumps of them at a time and then just taking them wholesale out to sell, you know, and so, I would say like, yeah, the above ground parts are always always gonna be more sustainable to harvest. But also, if you're taking flowers from a plant, for example. I'm trying to think of like a good example of this. I love peach flower medicine, I love peach flower for grief and for hot agitated states and there are feral peach flower trees and, and there's old orchards that are no longer sprayed. And when you're harvesting peach flowers, you can actually support the tree because they need to not let all of those flowers go ripe and become flat fruit because it's too much. So, if you selectively just pick a couple blooms off the into clusters, that's actually going to help the plant overall, you know? Or I'm thinking of, I wanted to give another example of something in a more urban setting. but linden trees are plants, there are some linden trees that are native to this continent, they're called basswood trees, that's the name here. But there's European lindens that are planted ornamentally There's a bunch of them in downtown Asheville. But that's like, where there'll be a huge tree covered with thousands of blossoms and the flowers are the medicine there too. And they're always covered with bees. Bees love them. But, if you see something like that, where you're like, it's impossible to even imagine how many there are, then you can take some flowers, and you're not going to hurt that tree. You know, I guess if we all did that, that would be something we're thinking about. And that's why having a perennial relationship where you see the shifts through the years, see who's getting hit. And, if an area is being over harvested, you can tell because you've been paying attention, that would be something to do. But yeah, I would say like there are a lot of like flowering trees where you can get the flowers or you could even prune some of the branches and have some of what you need. But also with urby plants, the above ground plant, you can kind of see the parts, the aerial parts is what we call them, and notice how much has gone. And usually you can tell if someone else has been there, right. So, that would be what I would say. But again, if you if you're sticking to really weedy abundant plants, then this is going to just be less of an issue like goldenrod, for example, is a gorgeous endemic plant, or a plant that grows on a lot of parts of Turtle Island, which is a really excellent allergy remedy. Not so good for food. But they're incredibly weedy. You'll see a giant field of them right over the place, you know, and so if you just stuck to plants that were pretty weedy and abundant like that, even if you got as much as you're going to need for the year, it would be very little in a dent of even one plant stand. Margaret 27:45 Yeah. Okay, so I took a bunch of notes on what you were saying, because there's so many pieces that I want to pick apart. And one of them is this, I've been running across this thing more, and I suspect you've probably run across a mortgage or rent more in these circles. But this idea that like, the concept of nature is sort of a colonial construct. This idea that like, when we create the idea of nature, we're talking about something that is distinct from humans, and how that's like, kind of this thing that like gets us off the hook. Like when we imagine like humans as only bad. It like lets us off the hook for being bad as compared to like, it seems like you could talk about either you show up and you dig up all the roots of these, you know, ginseng or whatever that's been there forever, and you just like mess everything up, versus they're like other plants that do very well for humans as part of the ecosystem interacting with them in the same way that they do very well for having bees in the ecosystem or birds in the ecosystem. Whatever. Yes. I don't know, it's really interesting to me. And I'm wondering if that's like a conversation that... Janet 28:46 I think that's been a helpful conversation, I think, for people to have around not just having black and white thinking around it, which is what you're gonna get, I think, which is that, if we're actually in relationship, then we're going to be able to care for the plants instead of just taking or just ignoring. I mean, there's definitely, unfortunately, a pretty big segment of people who are into environmental biology who do have a very hands off, 'don't interfere, just leave it,' you know, kind of perspective. Margaret 29:21 The Star Trek approach. Janet 29:23 Definitely, which is I mean, ridiculous given that there are no plants left on the planet who are not being impacted by human activity. So, you actually going in and maybe... So, part of, this is like, kind of an aside from what we're talking about, but there's this concept called assisted migration, which when you're like, "These plants hate how hot it's getting right here. We should move them further north." You know, and so there's all these people who are like, "No, no, we can't interfere. We might ruin everything." You know, it's like time traveling or something like we actually, like do one thing wrong and everything will be, it'll be a clusterfuck. And the whole system will collapse because we move this tree up there. And who knows who else is on there. But then there's a lot of people who there's actually like secret groups who meet to help with assisted migration and to propagate. It's really wild. Anyway, I say all this just to say that, like I'm not on a never interfere with, because I think the interference is happening already. I mean, it's not my life's work to move trees around to places where they might make it. Right. But that is something that, you know, even the research we have about this extinction crisis is just that the loss is huge. And are there places where we could support life becoming, like diversifying and strengthening, plant communities as other trees are coming out? Like right now, where I live? I don't know if this is how you're where it is where you're at or not, but the ash trees are all dying. Margaret 30:56 The ash borer, whatever? Yeah. Janet 30:58 And it's really happening hardcore where we live. So yes, it is true that there will be other trees that are going to come in to those canopy gaps, to live. But we are seeing these forests change dramatically right now. And it's just, it's going to be interesting. Like, there are people who, because the hemlocks are dying out as well from the woolly adelgid along the rivers and streams, and some places around here, there are people who are like, "Well, what are the plants that we could put in here intentionally, that would help shade that would support the trout and support the life in here?" You know, and so those kinds of ecosystem design frameworks make people really uncomfortable because of the level of damage that has happened through the inadvertent introduction of certain species. Margaret 31:48 Right. Well, it's like, if we fucked something up so bad. And 'we' is a weird word to use in this context. But sure, you know, I mean, I'm a settler here and I, you know, reap the rewards of that in terms of like, the foods available to me at the store, whatever, tons of shit. But okay, we fucked this thing up so bad. I can understand people's like, "Oh, no, we fucked it up. We just shouldn't do anything." But, but that's a little bit like, pushing someone over. And then they're like, "Help me up," and you're like, "No, last time I interacted with you, it went really bad. So I'm just gonna walk away." Janet 32:25 No, I mean, exactly. Like, we're gonna just watch the destruction happen that is in the wake of this economic system, and not actually do anything to change it, because we might hurt something. I mean, it's absurd when you actually lay it out that way. Margaret 32:41 Yeah, we set the house on fire. And now we don't want to run in and help people because we just make everything worse, so we should avoid everything. I mean, it's because I think that it makes sense for people to not be like, wildly cavalier about deciding that, you know, they should just get to reengineer the way that ecosystems work. I like, Oh, that's such an interesting tension that I don't have any answers for but... Janet 33:07 Well, I mean, there is a lot of tension with it. I mean, I think a lot of times when I see scientists who are taking a really hard line, 'no interference' stance, they are people who don't study indigenous land management, and don't understand the level to which humans normally play in ecosystem, design and movement, and construction. And so I think that in general, what would be the wisest thing to do for anyone would be you know, what, if you're not indigenous to this place, what are the indigenous folks around you saying about what is wild tending? And what does support and stewardship of this land look like right now? Margaret 33:45 Right. Yeah, though, that makes sense. What is involved in...you know, I'm not indigenous and what would be involved in trying to find that out where I'm at? Do I look for people who are like kind of talking about that publicly? I assume the answer is not just like, go find my friends who are indigenous and be like, "You there..." Janet 34:05 Well, it depends. I mean, it really depends where where people live. I mean, there are in many places around the continent, I'm learning more and more about this, there are actually are cultural centers where you can talk to folks and be like...who are working on land management stuff, right then you know, within whatever tribal sovereignty they have in that situation. Here, this is unceded, Cherokee land, but you know, we are in contact with folks who are doing wild tending and talking about...a lot of the schools there in the Cherokee where the actual reservation is, they are actually trying to introduce more and more wild foods, you know, and so through talking to folks who are part of that project, we've been able to be like, "Okay, like, what, would be helpful for you to have more of?" Also, one thing that I would say in most places, there's some tension between what indigenous groups...what land they have access to and in the Cherokee area, I mean, a specific part that they're still have control over right now, you know, I know a grandmother who was given a $500 citation for picking herbs in the National Forest, for her daughter's memorial, you know, and, at the same time, like they had to have...the Cherokee folks had to push through to try to get a permit to be able to pick this plant called sochan, which is a wild perennial green that people eat in the spring especially. And so through communicating around with those folks, like I've been able to, like learn, like what plants are being prioritized with them, but also like supporting them, you know, like, they had to petition the state for us to be like, "Can we pick herbs on this land?" Right? Yeah. And so actually, like, as annoying as it is supporting that getting the word out, making sure that there's a shit ton of signatures sent to the State Forest, which are just like that this even a question is absurd, right? Especially because there are plenty of settler foragers just going out and foraging with no sort of impact. I mean, they're having an impact, but they don't have to deal with any consequences. So yeah, I guess I would say is like figuring out who's just around you, you know, and usually, and the thing is, is I don't know how the regions are all over the country, but it definitely in the west and southwest and in some parts of the southeast, too, it's not that hard to find cultural centers, or people who are working on land and food sovereignty, where they're at. And so I would just say, I don't know about specifically where you are and that's an interesting question. But, there are cultural centers in a lot of places that will have people working on food, wild food support, and often just like land tending and medicine ways. And I know, in the West, like, we've had a couple of students who actually are doing fire management, intentional fire trainings with with different indigenous tribes out there. And so they're actually learning to do the fire management practices from the people on the ground who had that tradition. And I think that's a fascinating way to learn to and to be like...because that can be somewhat dangerous as you're learning, right?And so like, that feels like a pretty big service to me, to be like, "Could you help do that kind of work somewhere?" And you would learn as you went, what plants are being prioritized, which plants need support, what plants are problems, you know, through through that work as well. Margaret 37:55 Okay. I liked that. I liked that's...I feel like usually that kind of question the like, "Well, what can you do?" doesn't have as good of a concrete answer as that I really appreciate that. One of the things you were talking about earlier, you're talking about, you know, the ramps that are being sold to the restaurants and stuff, right? And I was just thinking about how it seems like when you're talking about foraging, and when you're talking about wildcrafting, obviously, scale matters, but also when money gets involved, it seems like it gets real messy. And like, I wonder how people like, like, is there any ethical wild foods that introduce into market environments? Or is it like pretty much, if you're going to be doing foraging, you should be feeding yourself and your family and maybe your community but not doing it at like market scale? Janet 38:49 Yeah, that's tough. I mean, I don't know. There's definitely some folks around here who do like a wild food, food share even. And then there's people who do wild food...there's like a wild food booth at the farmers market because of this. That's how it is around here. There's just more people with that interest who are willing to pay the big bucks for foraged items. And so I can imagine... Margaret 39:07 Which is just like ironic, but anyway. Janet 39:09 Yeah, if you could see what's on the table at this spot, it's pretty wild. But um, anyway, but so that feels like a scale....it's not that....I'm like, who's actually....like, how much are they actually selling at the farmers market every week? Like, you know, I don't know, it doesn't seem like huge but once we think about like actually scaling up to like, say, like, provide for several stores or something like that, and it does get kind of out of hand. And I know that in some places, like mushroom foraging has gotten pretty wild in a way that can be destructive, but again, that depends on the mushroom. I mean some mushrooms, it actually helps them to have a lot of people in there just sort of disturbing the ground and like spreading the spores around, while some mushrooms when it's not actually the fruiting body like Chaga or something it can be somewhat damaging harvest a lot of it. It really just depends. I think that, if, say like your product was something that was a really, a plant that's causing a lot of trouble in a whole area? Like around here there's there are people who are working really madly on kudzu root production and using kudzu root for for starch and using kudzu root to make paper. They have this kudzu camp every year and like dig a ton of kudzu root and just trying to figure out how many ways they could work with kudzu root. If that was what was entering the market, then that would be fine. Because as you know, having lived in the southeast, there's no shortage of kudzu for people to work with. So, if we were actually making a marketable item out of opportunistic and aggressive plants, then that would be not a bad idea, actually. I mean, yeah, who knows? I'm sure it could get weird. Margaret 40:59 Yeah. Right, because you could eventually enter the nonprofit trap. Like, I'm not anti nonprofits. But at some level, every nonprofit has a financial incentive to continue its problem existing. Janet 41:10 Oh, yes. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So you'd be like, "Oh, God, we've got our kudzu. What are we gonna do?" Margaret 41:15 Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's a good problem for us to run into, right? Janet 41:22 Yeah, definitely. Margaret 41:23 And then, like, I was thinking about one of the other places I've been with the most, like intense invasive things, I think of like, the Himalayan blackberries in the Pacific Northwest, that will just like, take over every field. And, and in some ways, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, great, you know, blackberries." And then I'm like, "Oh, I think if you're just picking the berries, you're actually just propagating." Janet 41:42 Totally, Margaret 41:43 We would need to instead like have the commercial product, 'heart of BlackBerry root' or something, you know? Janet 41:50 It would need to be the root. Probably, yeah. Which is just so wild. If you've ever removed a lot of that stuff, it's so intense. Margaret 41:58 Yeah, I used to do landscaping. And that was, most of what we did is remove Blackberry, BlackBerry root balls or whatever. It's been a long time. Janet 42:08 I think also, since you brought the Northwest up again, I just wanted to say that like part of what I would want to just share here, since we're giving different specific examples is that really, it just matters like place to place even weedy and abundant plants in some places can be a problem if you're harvesting them other places. Like here, stinging nettle is like pretty aggressive. It's abundant. There's a lot of places where you can harvest a huge amount and make barely a dent in the stinging nettle patch. But, I know that there are places in the Northwest where there's actually been a problem. And there are certain butterflies who exclusively lay their eggs, that have caterpillars that feed on nettles, which I don't remember what kind of butterfly this is, and so those butterflies have become endangered because of the foraging craze around Portland specifically, because it's a very small area that they inhabit. So, while I could be like "Nettles, great, just take the top third of the plant. It's a huge patch, it won't matter." Like that doesn't translate to everywhere across the continent, right? So part of what we have to do if we're going to be foraging much for food or medicine is to actually know what are the conditions for the plant where we live? And not just have...I can't give a list of what's safe to harvest everywhere. That's why invasives can feel a little safer. Because generally, if you know something invasive, then you already know that it would be helpful to right take some of them out, but other plants not so much. You know. Margaret 43:41 That's actually one of the things that's really interesting. I think there's a lot of topics that we talked about on the show where you kind of can't learn from this show. You kind of can't learn from this like: "Oh, I follow a forger on Instagram. therefore know all this stuff." I mean, like, I'm sure you can learn a ton of stuff that way. I'm not trying to disparage that, or my own show. But it sounds like local knowledge will always be necessary in a lot of different fields that are the kinds of fields that we like, we as a species need to like learn or we as a culture or whatever, like need to learn in order to survive what's coming anyway are a lot of these skills where we're actually interacting with the places we're at in terms of you know, whether it's like making microclimates that the temperature doesn't change as much or being able to continue to eat food on a regular basis or whatever. as we as we move more local, a lot of the knowledge has to move local. That's really interesting to me. Janet 44:35 Yeah, that's definitely true. And I would also say that it's something that like you have to kind of pay attention to over time, because we have local knowledge as of now, but the climate is shifting so quickly. And a lot of people I know are in zones that have changed already in the past five years. And so, we also need to be paying attention to like who amongst the plants is impacted by this shift to warmer and erratic weather, and who is thriving like that, you know, and so it's also just paying attention to those changes. And and that's something that it really just helps to be an observer over time or to speak to people who've been around for quite a while. And within that, I think it's probably important for us to think of the concept of the shifting baseline from ecology. Which, the shifting baseline means that like...Okay, so my example would be like, when my dad was a kid, my dad's 87. When my dad was a kid, there were so many more kinds of birds, there were so many more animals of all kinds all around like wild animals. There are a lot more specific kinds of like big birds that eat big insects, like Whippoorwills, there are more Bobwhites, there were all these....there were more birds that have now you know, I think the estimation is that there's maybe some people say 30%, some say 50%, less birds than there were 50 years ago. Margaret 45:59 That is so depressing. Janet 46:00 It's incredibly depressing. But when I was growing up, I would not know that if I hadn't read that, or hadn't talked to my dad about how many birds there were, or how many fish there were, or whatever, because I would think like this is how many how much of x there is, you know. And so when you grow up with less, you think less is normal. And we have generation after generation growing up with less and less and less. We have lost an incredible amount of biomass globally. And we don't always know that. So, what I can say like locally living somewhere where there's been like, I don't even know how many herbs schools over the past two decades, there have been so many herbs, schools, and so many foraging schools and places where people....and it just draws and attracts people who are interested in doing that kind of stuff. But also, if you're not already, you will probably will be if you stay here for long enough, I guess. Anyway, the impact on wild plant communities where plant walks happen often, where herbs schools take their students often has been very notable. And it's because, you know, we have like, there's just like, year after a year of alumni, of cohorts of students, of different people who have moved here who have gone and taken classes, and those people continue to visit those spots. Sometimes even if teachers have asked them not to. And they bring their friends, you know, and there's this whole, exponentially more people harvesting plants of certain kinds, there's certain ones that are specifically more exciting than others, probably. And so, just in seeing what's happened since I moved here with some of the more accessible spots with specific plant communities, I'm thinking of pedicularis specifically right now, which Wood Betony is another name for that herb, that's a plant that's very cool and easy to identify, but also has like sort of a relaxing, muscle relaxing feel to it. So people really like it cause it has a little bit like, body relax, feel. And so those patches have just been decimated. And when I see that I'm like, you know, a lot of herb schools, at least in what I was taught traditionally, it was like people would be like, "Go in. And you can have like, you can take about one out of every 10 plants." You know, and that would be like the maxim that we were taught at a certain point, 10%. And, but if everybody comes and takes 10%, what does that even mean? So, that is something that I've seen here specifically is like a cumulative effect of over harvest, over time. And it's increased not just with the people in the field that I'm in, but just with an increase in learning about wild plants and learning what they do. Because people want to take care of their own health or they want to feed themselves, you know, like, I mean, it's not coming from the worst place. It's just that when we're not in relationship and don't know, the baseline of what that patch looked like fifteen years ago, then we don't know that we're in a decimated area, or where we're with plants that are under stress. That's something that you know, from yearly visitation. Margaret 49:07 Okay, and so it seems like then the 'answer,' I hate saying the 'answer,' because I'm sure it's more complicated than anything I could say after that. But like, is this thing that you're talking about, about being in relationship with these plant communities, rather than a quick maxim about like, "Oh, go visit and just it's totally chill to take this stuff," versus like, knowing what's actually happening there and how things are changing. That makes sense. And then as you're saying, with like, a few exceptions, where you're like, "Look, it's fine to take plantain. Fuck it," or whatever. Janet 49:40 Yeah, right. Margaret 49:43 Okay. Yeah, it ties into this thing that I keep thinking back on is like this concept of like, the wild feels infinite, you know? Well, of course, I can't affect the number of...I mean, if you can even look at this, like in a negative sense, right? It's like, :"Oh, I can't affect the number of ticks in my yard." But you actually can. I know the number of ticks in my yard, my yard in particular, feels infinite. How can I possibly have an impact on the number of ticks? And there are ways that I could impact that number of ticks and like, so like, if I had guinea hens or whatever, and they ate a bunch of ticks, you could actually create a notable difference, even though it seems like you're digging from this infinite pool of ticks. This is a very gross metaphor. And so that makes sense that yeah, either these things that feel abundant, and as long as you take 10%, but you're not thinking about how everyone does it. I mean, the whole baseline shift thing, I like...nothing is more depressing to me than thinking about the lack of biodiversity as compared to a hundred, years ago, even. Janet 50:49 It's so wild. Margaret 50:51 Yeah. Which leads me to the sort of conclusion of like, I think I have a difference in opinion than a lot of my friends and a lot of my community, like, I have more of this, like, "Great, we all need to start growing food inside," like, this very, like opposite method of solving it, or rather, specifically, because I think a lot of people are like, "Oh, well, we'll all go forage," right? You know, as this like, "Ah, well, nature will provide for us," and it's kind of like, well, nature did provide for us, and then our culture, our settler culture, like fucked that up real bad. But, I like this thing that you're talking about, about like, one of the main ways to solve that, on a small scale, at least is to grow into community with the place that you're harvesting from, to not be extractive. Janet 51:42 I think that there has to be kind of a mix too. I mean, I agree with you, like, I encourage people to grow their own medicine and to grow their own food as much as they can. But, also, I can say that like as a...I'm a clinician, like, you know, I have a clinical practice with herbs. And once you actually see the volume of plant material it takes to keep even a few people on a formula, or on a tea, it's really wild. Like if I was not using some grown plants with also some weedy plants that I can just harvest, like, I don't know what I would do. And that's just me. Like, if we were all doing what I'm doing, then the amount of plant material would be pretty enormous. I mean, I think about how, you know, in China, it's amazing, they have still pretty intact herbal medicine tradition that's part of their medical system. I mean, it got homogenized after Mao, for sure, and changed, although they're still people who practice pre Maoist Chinese medicine, but they have an enormous amount of land given to a monoculture of growing herbs for that industry. And so, you know, when I have folks be like, "Well, we should just grow our own plants," I'm like, "Well, when we're actually, if you were actually talking about the scale of supporting a lot of people's health, that is a lot of land." And and for feeding, it's going to be even more or land, because the caloric intake we would all require is more than that, that we need with herbs, right? So,how much land are we talking? You know? Margaret 53:15 No, that that makes a lot of sense. One of the things you brought up at the beginning, that you said you wanted to return to and we're coming near the end, you were talking about how like more and more you're seeing maybe students coming to your school, because they're interested in herbalism. And they're interested in forging and wildcrafting out of economic necessity. Basically. Like, you know, I think about, you're talking about, like, your wildcrafted table at the farmers market where everything is like wildly expensive. No pun intended. And, you know, versus like, kind of the whole point of foraging is that it's free. Right? And I wonder if you want to talk more about that, about like...because I do think that there is even if I'm like, obviously there's a million problems with foraging, it does seem like it still could have a way to be useful to help people on an economic level as like food prices go through the roof and wages stagnate or disappear. And all that. Janet 54:11 I do, I do think it has a place. And I will say that like you know, just for the record in case my students are listening to that, there's always a fair number of people who have come in like staunchly anti wildcrafting as well. So there's definitely a pretty good mix. But, I but I've been noticing more and more every year there are more people that are like, "I think this is a survival skill," with the economic downturn that's happening, which is what you're referring to. And so I do think that wild foods that are abundant and weedy can be a really helpful supplement to other food. For sure. I think that actually trying to live off of it is challenging. That's something people will learn. But, you know, it is true that there's some things we get with wild foods that we do not get from the domesticated food that we eat normally and I should just point out that I think that unless people can afford to eat organic foods, especially if it's organic food with restorative agricultural practices, which is not a lot of organic food, we're usually eating food if it comes from the grocery store, and in some cases, even the farmers market that is coming from extremely depleted soil, because the pressures of capitalism, of the market require people just to like, not ever let the land be fallow. They just have to continue to pump the land and extract that food from it in ways even though they're growing the food. And so most of the food that we eat is pretty nutrient deficient, compared to what it would be in a more restorative agricultural system. Now wild food, if it's not in a place that's very polluted, that's a whole other topic that we should probably mention, is going to be growing out of a place that's not just having like a cycling of harvest over and over again. And so they tend to be more nutrient dense. So, if you could pick nettles in a place that doesn't have a lot of toxins in the soil, it's going to, they're going to be nettles, that actually have a lot more mineral content than the greens you get at the grocery store. The same is true for dandelion greens. So, while you might not be able to really like, bulk up your diet with a ton of calories from the wild, although you could, it just honestly takes a lot of time and energy that not everyone has. You will, even by supplementing a little bit with dandelion greens or other wild greens, you are going to actually get more of a nutritional impact. You'll get more minerals. You get this bitter flavor that's been mostly bred out in the domesticated greens and lettuces. There's not bitter any more. Bitterness actually has a purpose, which is that it helps the liver function, it helps with digestion. So, I do think that if people supplemented their diets with some wild food, it would be beneficial in more than just those calories and in more than just the money saved, because we are eating from such a depleted food system. So, this is all to say that as our budgets are being impacted by the level of inflation and how much food cost, which is just going to get worse is what it looks like, it's also just true that we're we're buying food that doesn't have as much nutrition as it should. You know? And so, you're getting more than just like that handful of greens on your salad, you're getting actually like pretty dense nutritional food. Margaret 57:35 That makes sense to me. At the beginning of the pandemic, I basically like lived off of my prepper stash, supplemented by wild greens for like, a month or so, which I wouldn't like immediately recommend anyone has like fun and joyous. But, I was really, really grateful, like none of my calories came from the wild greens, but the sense that I'm actually like taking care of my body came from the wild greens. Janet 57:59 Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And that does change things. You know, I mean, I think that's what I would say, is I'm not sure how much it'll like reduce cost hugely at this point to be adding in a lot of other food, but that improvement in your health is going to be noticeable. Margaret 58:22 Okay, well, we're coming up on an hour. I'm wondering if there's anything in particular that we missed that you wish we had talked about or like? Janet 58:33 Oh, I do have Yeah, I do have one thing to talk about. So, this may also makes sense to you, having lived around here at some point, and it's that I was going to recommend that people read this essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer that's called "The Honorable Harvest" and I can send you a link to that because there's PDFs of that online, but she admits I was....Yeah, I was reviewing it today and she reminded me of something and it's that so, for a while, this is getting to be less the case, but for a while, within different herbs circles and foraging circles that I was adjacent to there was a sort of a nod towards respectful relationships with the plants you might be harvesting and Robin Wall Kimmerer says in her piece, like you know, "Always ask permission from the plant." But, there's something that I was seeing like pretty commonly in settler foragers and herbalist, which would be like just like a really quick like, "Is this okay?" to the plant and then they're like, "They said, "Yes,"" and then they would just go ahead and harvest very quickly, you know, and like, just like I swear, like immediate, like plants they'd never hung out with before like, this happened in front of me, like I mean, you know. And so, I had always been like kind of turned off by the exchange, well it wasn't really an exchange, but like by that whatever gesture, gesture towards pretending to have communication. Which it doesn't mean there's not communication but, there was this really awesome way that Robin Wall Kimmerer talked about it where she's just like, "You have to use both parts of your brain for that conversation. You're not just using the talking and listening, you have to also use the part of your brain that's assessing that circumstances, assessing the health of the plant, attention over time. It's not just about intuition and communication with the plant world. It's also actually about empirical understanding and paying attention," you know. And so to me, and what I've seen in my life is that like, I'm like, I sometimes know, it's not even appropriate to ask. I'm just like, "This standard is not doing okay. I'm not going to harvest plants here right now," you know. And so, the idea that all that we need is like a really brief exchange of like, "Is this cool? Cool. Got it," you know and move in. It's like, that's still very extractive. But, it makes you feel like you did something. Margaret 1:00:52 I mean, there's a really obvious comparison here to like the way that consent culture and sex is like not handled incredibly well. Janet 1:01:00 Sure. Margaret 1:01:00 Yeah, where people are like, "Whatever. I asked," versus like, "I should try and figure out how everyone actually feels." Janet 1:01:07 Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So just to say that, like, it's more than asking, like asking, and listening,. Listening means actually listening over time. It's not an instant gratification listen, you know? Yeah, that's my last note, which would just be like to actually learn to listen and pay attention and observe and not...Unlearning extractive tendencies. And unlearning the entitlement that we all carry, live and breathe in settler colonial capitalism is a lot of work. And it requires patience and time. But also, I will say that if you see someone else behaving in a way that you're not that into, you know, understanding that probably yelling at them is not gonna make them change their mind or behavior very quickly. So, also to have patience with other people who were on different learning edges here with this, you know? Margaret 1:02:05 Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. Well, where can people...do you want people to find you? Janet 1:02:16 Yes, I have. So, I have a blog that's called Radical Vitalism with my partner, Dave. And our school is Terra Sylva School, which we run with Jen Stovall. I can put that stuff in, I'll send it to you to put in the show notes. And then we also have a podcast called The Book on Fire. And we're about to start our third season. And we're going to actually talk about the "Dawn of Everything." So, that should relate... Margaret 1:02:41 Oh, I love that book. Janet 1:02:42 Yeah, so good. So good. So, it relates to kind of some of what we're talking about at least. Margaret 1:02:46 Cool. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much. And I'm sure have you on again, at some point. Janet 1:02:54 Yeah. Thanks a lot. Margaret 1:02:55 Thank you so much for listening. if you enjoyed this podcast....Well, first of all, if you enjoyed hearing from Janet, I highly recommend that you check out the earlier episode with Janet and Dave about herbalism and herbalism for emergency medical needs and all of that. They have a lot to say. And if you enjoyed this episode, and you enjoy this podcast in general, please consider supporting us by telling people about the podcast and telling the internet about the podcast and telling algorithms about the podcast by rating, and reviewing, and subscribing, and all of that stuff that has a larger impact than one might expect. Much like killing ticks in your yard, you can also support us financially. This podcast pays its audio editor and the transcriptionist. And we're very proud to be able to do that work. And we are supported in that work by the people who support Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness on Patreon, the publisher that publishes us. That's what makes it a publisher. It's called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. We have another podcast called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness that you can check out, that comes out every month and has different fiction, and memoir, and poetry, and essays, and all kinds of fun stuff that comes out once a month. And if you support us on Patreon, you'll get a zine in the mail every month. Well, if you support us at $10 or more on Patreon, you get a zine in the mail every month. And in particular, I would like to thank Aly and Paparouna and Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, Theo, Hunter, Sean, S.J., Paige, Mikki, Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea, Kat J., Staro. Jenipher, Eleanor, Kirk, Sam, Chris, Michaiah, and Hoss the dog. You all make it possible, make the dream work. You're the team work...anyway, I will talk to you all soon and I hope you're doing as well as you can. Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

As winter begins to thaw, and the start of spring arrives, a certain segment of the American population usually begins to experience a familiar type of “madness” as the second most popular sporting event of the year hits the airwaves. But did you know that college basketball might not annually grip the nation with “March Madness” had it not been for an Italian American? And chances are his is a name you've probably never heard of! This week's guest, Mike DeLucia, tells us the story of Angelo-Giuseppi “Hank” Luisetti, the 1930s Stanford University superstar who pioneered many of the moves we see on the courts today, from stylized dribbling to the one-handed shot! In his book, “Madness: The Man Who Changed Basketball," Mike tells readers why Luisetti could —and perhaps should—be considered the greatest basketball player who ever lived. Mike tells us about Luisetti's career, as a phenom during the years of the Great Depression, explains why Luisetti's name isn't as well-known today as it should be, and shares his own author's journey to reconstruct this lost icon's story. We'll also look at the role of sports in the Italian American experience and find out why so many stories of pioneering Italian American athletes are lost to time and what we can do about bringing them to light. If you're ready for some March Madness, Italian American style, you won't want to miss this episode! This episode is sponsored by Mediaset Italia.

In the midst of the Great Depression, cereal manufacturer Kellogg's switched to a shorter, six-hour day. This continued a trend that seemed inevitable: people would work less and less. But economic policies, management strategies, and cultural attitudes changed. The story of the rise and fall of Kellogg's six-hour day is a microcosm of these changes, as well as of our attitudes about the roles of money, leisure, work, and women and men. In the book, Kellogg's 6-Hour Day, historian Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt shares his findings in studying Kellogg's shorter workday. His main sources of information were 434 interviews conducted by the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor, 124 interviews he himself conducted of workers, and 241 responses to a survey he had sent. What follows is a summary of the story, and Hunnicutt's findings. Kellogg's switched to a 6-hour day to create jobs During the Great Depression, American businesses took on a policy of “work sharing.” The idea was that fewer would be unemployed if everyone shared jobs – more workers, working fewer hours. So, on December 1, 1930, W. K. Kellogg changed most departments in Kellogg's Battle Creek, Michigan plant from three eight-hour shifts to four six-hour shifts. A shorter workday had seemed inevitable This continued a decades-long trend of shorter working hours. Labor activist William Heighton had written in 1827 that the workday should be reduced from twelve hours to ten, eight, and so on, “until the development and progress of science have reduced human labour to its lowest terms.” John Stuart Mill had written in 1848 about his vision for a “Stationary State”: After necessities were met, people would seek progress in mental, moral, and social realms. John Maynard Keynes would predict in the same year Kellogg's switched to six hours, 1930, that we'd have a fifteen-hour work week by 2030. George Bernard Shaw and Julian Juxley had predicted a maximum two-hour workday by the end of the 1900s. Other businesses shortened their workdays, too Other businesses followed Kellogg's' lead. A survey by the Industrial Conference Board in 1931 estimated 50% of American businesses had shortened hours to save jobs. President Herbert Hoover was considering making a 6-hour day a national policy. In the 1932 presidential campaign, both major parties were advocating shorter hours. The 6-hour day was the hot business topic Not only did the six-hour day help create jobs, it seemed for a while like it was a better business policy. Forbes called it “the topic of discussion in the business world.” Business Week concluded it was profitable. The New York Times called it “a complete success.” Factory and Industrial Management magazine called the six-hour day, the “biggest piece of industrial news since Ford announced his five-dollar-a-day policy.” At Kellogg's, 15% more shredded wheat cases were being packed per hour. Profits had doubled in 1931, versus three years prior. After five years with the six-hour day, overhead costs had been reduced 25%, labor costs 10%, with 41% fewer accidents. W. K. Kellogg said, “We can afford to pay as much for six hours as we formerly paid for eight.” (That should be taken with a grain of salt. W. K. Kellogg took pride in crafting a public image as a “welfare capitalist,” as evinced by the full-page newspaper ads he took out, boasting how Kellogg's had done its part. In reality, nearly half of workers later surveyed recalled that their wages were reduced.) Kellogg's returned to an 8-hour day for WWII In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order to direct the maximum amount of manpower toward supporting the country's fight in WWII. Kellogg's responded in kind by temporarily returning to eight-hour shifts. A rift formed between Kellogg's management and the labor union This was actually an opportunity the company had been looking for. Kellogg's management and that at other companies were beginning to resent the six-hour day, and workers were becoming divided over whether they wanted a shorter workday, or more pay. In 1936, the National Council of Grain Producers had started a union chapter in Kellogg's Battle Creek headquarters. W. K. Kellogg had been proud to pay what he considered the best hourly wages in town. During the first meeting with union officers, he wept, and kept saying, “If only they had come to me, I would have given them what they wanted.” The union got an inch, and wanted a mile After this point, the relationship between Kellogg's workers and management became adversarial. W. K. had left in 1937, after the union came in, and at that point the union leaders had been pushing to not only have a six-hour day, in which they could earn a bonus based upon productivity, but they had also wanted time-and-a-half pay for working more than six hours in a day. Hunnicutt wrote, “More than any other union demand, this position would come to haunt Kellogg workers.” Demanding overtime pay on a six-hour day helped turn management against the shorter workday, and create a rift between workers who wanted higher wages, and workers who wanted shorter hours. In the larger relationship between management and labor, the American Federation of Labor introduced a bill in congress, prohibiting goods produced by workers working more than thirty hours a week from being traded across state lines. Hunnicutt cites this as having shifted the business world's stance on shorter hours from support to opposition. Shorter hours became exploitation, longer hours a reward In 1938, Kellogg's management deepened the divide between six-hour and eight-hour workers by proposing they be allowed to schedule 40-hour weeks during periods of heavy production. Overtime became available instead of a productivity bonus. Senior workers had priority access to overtime, and so they lost interest in the productivity bonus. So in the early 1940s, before the war, worker opinions were shifting to view shorter hours not as a benefit, but as instead an exploitation of workers – making them bear the brunt of fighting unemployment. And Kellogg's was actively campaigning against shorter days, asking workers to consider how much more they would make working eight hours. Human Relations Management saw work as life's center Meanwhile, the business world was shifting from a Scientific Management philosophy to a Human Relations Management philosophy. Scientific Management practitioners were obsessed with efficiency, but Human Relations Management practitioners were more interested in imbuing work with joy and meaning – making work its own reward. The Human Relations Management school envisioned that as work brought satisfaction, engineers and scientists would lead society into an orderly world, where desires met obligations, consumption met production, and work and leisure merged. According to Humans Relations Management, time away from work and consumption was a relic of an illogical past. Instead of work becoming obsolete, giving way to more freedom, work would become the center of life, and help us ascend Maslow's hierarchy. Fewer workers wanted to return to 6 hours After the war, many departments returned to six-hour shifts, but six-hour workers slowly lost their beloved shorter shifts over the following decades. Central to this struggle was how workers viewed leisure. Kellogg's workers had previously voted to essentially “buy” shorter working hours, being paid less overall, in exchange for more leisure time. Employees used their time to improve their homes, go hunting, grow and can food in their gardens, and spend time volunteering in their communities. But slowly, workers became less interested in having time away from work. Leisure was outsourced to mass media One explanation from a worker Hunnicutt interviewed was, people were now outsourcing all things they used to spend time on. One place they were outsourcing to was mass media. Sports had been such serious business amongst Kellogg's employees, they had hired “semi-pro” softball or basketball players to play on the teams. But why watch the company team play, when you can watch pros on television? One former six-hour worker bemoaned that even conversation had been outsourced – to radio, or television talk-show hosts. Shorter hours became seen as weak and feminine The question, Six hours or eight? became a gender issue. Early on, both men and women were interested in six-hour shifts. Three-fourths of men voted for six-hour shifts in 1937, but half of men were working eight hours by 1947. The six-hour departments began to be referred to as “girls' departments,” doing “women's work.” Management also assigned sick and disabled employees to the six-hour departments. Men who chose to work six-hours were labeled “sissies,” “lazy,” or “weird.” Men saw work, not leisure, as a source of control and identity Hunnicutt's interpretation was that men were increasingly seeing work as a place for control and identity – that many hadn't known what to do with themselves after their shorter shifts. They didn't like spending more time at home and being assigned chores by their wives, or hearing what they considered gossip. As a result, men placed more importance on working longer hours – or at least appearing to. Hunnicutt said men he interviewed commonly claimed to have gotten second jobs while they were working six hours. How often is “commonly”?, he doesn't say, but he points out only 35% ever did get second jobs. Men felt they “had to” work long hours This attitude, which we might today call “toxic masculinity,” extended into attitudes about leisure. When asked why they preferred longer hours, men spoke of necessity, and used dramatic language, saying they had to “keep the wolf from the door,” “feed the family,” and “put bread on the table.” When Hunnicutt pointed out to men who had been working in the 1950s that workers in the Great Depression had been willing to take pay cuts to have more free time, he says they got defensive, lectured him on “the facts of life economically,” called six-hours “nonsense” or a “pipe dream,” or dismissed the question as silly. While Hunnicutt's conclusions here are plausible, it seemed like he really wanted it to be true, and didn't present men's attitudes scientifically. There's no mention of what earnings were relative to cost-of-living, and no acknowledgement of what these men's roles might have been, truthfully, in the economics of their homes. There's not even a mention of how throwing thousands of young men into the meat grinder that was WWII, tasked with saving the world, might have affected their own perceptions of what was expected of them. Though he did present a story of one man who had found that the extra money he made going back to eight hours was due to his ex-wife, as alimony. A shorter workday became “a sexist ploy” In the 1970s, Kellogg's women worked with a local women's-rights group, who presented the case that six-hour shifts were a sexist ploy meant to subjugate women. They demanded management “allow” women to have “full-time” jobs. Kellogg's posted notices in the plant claiming that to make pay “comparable,” they were opening up eight-hour departments to women. In doing so, they skirted the issue: The activists had wanted not just comparable hours, but comparable hourly pay. The 6-hour mavericks held on Workers who stuck with the six-hour shift – who Hunnicutt calls “six-hour mavericks” – were about a quarter of the Kellogg's workforce from 1957, into the 1980s. The union worked according to a department-by-department vote on the length of the day, so long as the six-hour workers didn't interfere with the union majority's strategy to try to get higher wages and more benefits. With longer hours, efficiency fell by the wayside Overtime had previously been thought of as a penalty to the company for being understaffed, but it became a way for workers to earn more money while the company's staffing requirements remained flexible. According to Hunnicutt, with overtime instead of productivity bonuses, workers were less-motivated and careful. The company had to resort to being more controlling, motivating workers with fines, threats, and firings. The death of the 6-hour shift The increased benefits the union had fought for over the years may have worked against the six-hour shift. The final nail in the coffin was driven in 1984, when Kellogg's threatened to relocate if workers didn't vote to abandon the six-hour shift. So the six-hour workers gave in and voted to give it up. Some retired, some worked eight hours, but the coffin in which this nail was driven was both figurative and literal. The six-hour workers held a “funeral,” building a full-sized cardboard coffin, painted black, placed on the workroom floor, a cut-out skeleton placed inside. Thus reversed a trend that had held on for over 150 years. The idea of less work and more leisure gave way to a stable amount of work, and more consumption. It's tempting to blame the death of the 6-hour shift on one of many juicy narratives. You could say people forgot how to spend their leisure time. You could say people were overly-materialistic, and wanted more money, instead of time. You could say toxic masculinity and a patriarchal society tipped the scales so those who wanted to work shorter hours were no longer in the majority. You could say the unions got too demanding and sabotaged the long-fought battle for a shorter working day. All these are probably true to an extent. Ultimately, businesses want to, need to, maximize profit. They have to offer benefits to employees to stay competitive. To offer those benefits profitably, they need more work from fewer workers. If you believe the efficient-market hypothesis, if a shorter workday were indeed more profitable, some business would beat its competitors by offering one, and other businesses would follow suit. So far, that hasn't happened. If, as I believe, creativity becomes more important, productivity will be about [Mind Management, Not Time Management, and a more-relaxed work schedule will be embraced. But probably not for boxing corn flakes. There's your summary of Kellogg's 6-Hour Day This episode is essentially a summary of the book, Kellogg's 6-Hour Day, by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt. The book is very dense and written in an academic style, so I can't recommend it unless you really want to dig deep into questions about work and leisure. It's a provocative story that makes you wonder if we could be living in a world where a 6-hour day is standard. But it sounds like it wasn't even close. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »       Show notes: https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/kelloggs-6-hour-day/

In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in for the first of his four terms as president of the United States. It was in the depth of the Great Depression with a second world war on the horizon, and yet the man known as FDR. managed to bring hope in the most uncertain of times. Stewart McLaurin, President of the White House Historical Association, discusses how polio shaped the future president with author Jonathan Darman whose new book is called “Becoming FDR: The Personal Crisis That Made a President.” Struck with polio at the age of 39, FDR drew strength from his illness and used those hard-fought lessons to lead the American people out of desperate times and into a New Deal, inspiring future presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan along the way.   Find all our podcasts at: https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-white-house-1600-sessions Learn more about the White House Historical Association at: https://www.whitehousehistory.org/ #whitehouse #whitehousehistory #whha

Hello Misfit Nation!  This is Dave Lukas and welcome to another episode of the Misfit Entrepreneur, where it is our job to help you unleash your inner misfit and breakthrough to higher levels of success, wealth, and fulfillment by bringing you the best insight and information from the world's top entrepreneurs….. with a specific focus on their misfit side…the specific traits, habits, and secrets that have allowed them to thrive and succeed. This is another one of those special episodes where it is just me and you.  I've had a number of emails lately asking my about my thoughts on the current situation in the financial sector and how it might play out as well as how it will affect entrepreneurs.  First, I think it is important to note that no matter what happens, there are always opportunities for entrepreneurs.  Some of the largest companies you know today such as Allstate Insurance and Hewlett-Packard were started in the midst of the Great Depression.  Speaking of history, in order to understand where things are today with financial markets and our money and where things might go, we have to take go a little bit back in time.  Before I do, I want to say that I am in no way a financial advisor or am giving you financial advice.  You should consult with a competent financial professional for your own personal decisions.  You accept that you are responsible for your own financial choices and actions.  Listen to the episode as the notes are too long to enter here...   Best Quote:  Be on the lookout for the opportunities you can take advantage of and don't hesitate to act when they do.  Steel your mind and be prepared.  And never, ever quit.   Misfit 3: Understanding money and how it works and what it truly is, is critical to success in life and business. Focus on what you can control, not what you cannot. Mmoney is called currency because to work, it must be moving, otherwise, it is losing value.  One of the best places I believe to keep your money moving is investing in and owning businesses.    Show Sponsors: 5 Minute Journal: www.MisfitEntrepreneur.com/Journal

From 1932 to 1934, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were perhaps the best-known outlaws in the United States.  It was during the Great Depression that Bonnie and Clyde rose to fame for their daring bank heists and Robin Hood-esque crimes.  Hollywood glamorized them as a young couple in love, but in their time on the run, they left a trail of death and destruction in their path and are believed to be responsible for the deaths of four civilians and nine police officers.  Their story came to an abrupt end at the hands of authorities in May of 1934, when they were only 23 and 25 years old.   ***TRIGGER WARNING*** Murder - Gun Violence - Robbery - Self Mutilation - Mentions of Sexual Assault Hang with us: Follow Us on Instagram Like Us on Facebook Join our Case Discussion Group on Facebook Get Killer Queens Merch Bonus Episodes Support Our AMAZING Sponsors: ZocDoc: Go to Zocdoc.com/QUEENS and download the Zocdoc app for FREE. Then find and book a top-rated doctor today.  Simplisafe: Customize the perfect system for your home in just a few minutes at SIMPLISAFE.com/killerqueens. Go today and claim a free indoor security camera plus 20% off your order with Interactive Monitoring.  © 2023 Killer Queens Podcast. All Rights Reserved Audio Production by Wayfare Recording Music provided by Steven Tobi Logo designed by Sloane Williams of The Sophisticated Crayon YouTube Editing by Jennifer Da Silva

Ecclesiastes 7:8 encourages us to be patient in trials of all kinds, including our investments. If patience is a virtue, how do we apply that to our portfolios? We'll talk about it with investing expert Mark Biller. Mark Biller is executive editor at Sound Mind Investing.If you're feeling despondent about the losses suffered over the past year, be encouraged! PATIENCE IS A VIRTUEBiller reminds us that time is on the side of the long-term investor. This has always been the case — it was true after the dreadful losses of 2008's Financial Crisis, it was true after the Covid shock in 2020, and it's still true after last year's losses, whether or not this bear market is over yet.The U.S. stock market has been remarkably resilient. A portfolio divided 50-50 between large and small company stocks has returned about +11% per year over the last 95 years. Think about everything the market has been through since then — the Great Depression, a World War, and so on.Admittedly, that average obscures some wild rides along the way. There have been 12-month periods where losses were as horrifying as -69% and gains were as breathtaking as 240% (those two extremes actually happened back-to-back in 1932-1933). In fact, it's been very uncommon for stocks to actually return close to that  +11% average in any particular year — only about 5% of all the 12-month rolling periods over the last century or so have been within one percent of that 11% long-term average.What that means is that it's perfectly normal for the stock market's returns to be all over the place from year to year. And yet, despite that, time is on the side of the long-term investor. The longer you're willing to keep your money in the market, the greater your  likelihood of success.Biller writes about all this in a recent article at SoundMindInvesting.org, titled “Market Probabilities: What the Past Suggests About the Future.” It features a chart that shows that if you had randomly picked any 12-month period between 1926 and 2022 to own stocks, you would have had a 74% chance of making money. [1]How much money? The table shows you would have had about a 39% probability of making more than 20%, a 20% chance of making between 10% and 20%, and a 15% chance of earning between 1% and 10%.The chart shows these types of probabilities for holding periods of 1-year, 2-years — all the way out to 10-year holding periods. And that's where the numbers are really so reassuring.When you get out to five-year holding periods, losses occurred only 11% of the time. In other words, if you held your stocks for at least five years, the likelihood of making money increased to 89%.The chart also shows that as the holding period lengthens, the very large gains and losses gradually disappear as the market moves closer to its long-term historical average. And by the time you reach holding periods of 8-to-10 years, the likelihood of losing money falls to just 2%-3% of the time.Now, this assumes certain things, like your portfolio being properly diversified.This study reinforces the importance of diversification. The article notes that the S&P 500 Index, which is really a measure of large-company stock performance, was negative -1.4% for the 10-year period ending in 2008. But when we diversify that portfolio by splitting it evenly between large and small company stocks, that 10-year loss flips to a small gain of +2.7%.One of the main points of this article and the chart is to show how volatile stock market returns are over the short-term, and how that volatility rapidly diminishes as you stretch out your time horizon. Short-term returns are very unpredictable, but they become much more predictable the longer the time horizon extends. That's why SMI has always recommended at least a five-year time frame as a minimum for investing in the stock market, and 10 years is really what they prefer to see. You can't guarantee that a person will have a positive return investing in stocks over any given five or 10-year period, but historically, the odds of success go way up with those longer periods.And again, it's reassuring that even the worst recent 10-year period — that 1999 to 2008 period that ended with the Global Financial Crisis — still provided modest gains for diversified investors.DON'T TRY TO TIME THE MARKET ON YOUR OWNAll of the research suggests that most individual investors do a poor job of trying to time the market on their own. And most who try to do that, end up hurting their long-term results.So for someone who is NOT following along with a very disciplined, mechanical strategy like they're using at SMI, but has a 5-year time horizon and is contributing every month to their 401k, they should stick with simple dollar cost averaging. They should probably just keep making those contributions and count on the market to bounce back from any further damage that might be in store before they reach the end of their 5-year time period. This article we've been discussing today says that historically a person has an 89% chance of making money in stocks over a 5-year time period. That's the argument for continuing to dollar-cost-average right through a bear market like this.SEEKING A FINANCIAL ADVISERWhat kind of person needs a financial advisor?Biller says there are two main groups:  one is the person who doesn't enjoy financial stuff and doesn't want to do this on their own. Chances are, that type of person isn't going to do a particularly good job with it because they don't like it and it's a chore. So that's one good reason to offload it to an advisor.The second is a little less obvious, but it's a primary reason why many of SMI's do-it-yourself newsletter people eventually transition over to using SMI's Advisory service, and that's because they want to ensure their spouse is well cared for after they're gone. Many people tell SMI they don't mind handling their own investing, but their spouse would be lost because they haven't been involved. So they'll come over to work with an SMI advisor to make sure the transition is smooth for their spouse's benefit.And of course, we regularly recommend you seek out a Certified Kingdom Advisor if you need help with your investments. You should interview two or three of them, and you can start that process by visiting FaithFi.com/find. On this program, Rob also answers listener questions: What is the best way to select a lender for a home refinance? What kinds of retirement income are taxable? When does it make sense to refinance an auto loan? RESOURCES MENTIONED:CreditKarmaLendingTreeBe sure to check out the rest of FaithFi.com to access our books and our many free helpful resources. You can also find us on Facebook Faith and Finance (Live) and join the conversation. Thanks for your prayerful and financial support that helps keep Faith and Finance (Live) on the air. And if you'd like to help, just click the Give button. I realize we may not be able to post this. But just in case we can, I decided to paste it in.

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were an American criminal couple who traveled throughout the US with their gang. They were most well known for their Great Depression-era bank robberies. Donate to NCMEC through my campaign!  https://give.missingkids.org/campaign/kendall-rae/c438796 Shop my charity merch! https://milehighermerch.com/  All profits from this charity merch will be donated to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: https://www.missingkids.org/  This episode is sponsored by: PrettyLitter Check out Kendall's other podcasts: The Sesh & Mile Higher Follow Kendall! YouTube Twitter Instagram Facebook Mile Higher Zoo REQUESTS: General case suggestion form: https://bit.ly/32kwPly Form for people directly related/ close to the victim: https://bit.ly/3KqMZLj Discord: https://discord.com/invite/an4stY9BCN CONTACT: For Business Inquiries - kendall@INFAgency.com

During the Great Depression in the United States, a young couple, Bonnie and Clyde, grew to fame after robbing and murdering across the country. Their reign of terror came to an end in a hail of bullets-- 130 rounds to be exact – that were fired into their car after the police set up an ambush. This week's episode follows the story of Denis Muravyov and Katya Vlasova--teenagers in love who met a fate similar to the US's Bonnie and Clyde.Episode written by Jordan H.Join us on Facebook and IG: @HARDCORETRUECRIME Web: www.crimesandconsequences.com--------------->Get ad-free early releases of each episode, plus over 170 exclusive Members Only episodes by going to Patreon.com/tntcrimes or joining our Apple Channel on the Apple Podcast App.SOURCES:1) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3957200/Denis-calmly-come-Just-don-t-stupidDramatic-moment-armed-police-raid-house-Russian-boy-girl-15-live-streamed-shoot-killedthemselves.html2) https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueCrime/comments/zhybil/two_lovestruck_15yearolds_would_en d_up_live/3) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37987826 4) https://emeto.neocities.org/pskov5) https://www.operaphila.org/whats-on/on-stage-2019-2020/denis-katya/ 6) https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/russian-teenagers-livestream-shootout-with-policebefore-shooting-themselves-a3395786.html

This week's Urban Valor episode features Korean war veteran, Victor Real. Victor grew up in Santa Monica, CA during the Great Depression. To make money he picked cotton, grapes, and cleared out walnut fields. When the harvest ended, and there was no money to be made, Victor decided to enlist in the Marines. Shortly after enlisting, he requested to go to aviation school where he finished in the top three of his class. It landed him a job working  with President D. Eisenhower to establish what we now know as “Marine  One.” During a preflight inspection, Victor witnessed a plane crash into the ocean and ended up rescuing the drowning pilot who was stuck in his harness. Upon transitioning out of the Marine Corps, Victor received his engineering degree and was credited with two patents in his name for the work he did.

"I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people" - Franklin Delano Roosevelt, July 2, 1932, upon accepting the Democratic nomination for president~~~Did the New Deal get the United States out of the Great Depression? Or was it World War II? Just how successful was the New Deal anyway? Eric Rauchway, a distinguished professor of history at UC Davis and the author of Why the New Deal Matters, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal, and The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace, discusses the legacy of the New Deal and the impact it had in lifting the United States from the Great Depression.Support the show

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank is said to be the second largest bank collapse in U.S. history. There were lines of customers waiting to withdraw from their accounts. It looked like a run on the bank until President Biden, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and National Economic Council Director Lael Brainerd stepped in to avert a crisis similar to that of 2008. --Alex Newman returned to Crosstalk to bring his analysis to this issue. Alex is an award-winning international freelance journalist, author, researcher, educator and consultant. He is senior editor for The New American. He is author of Crimes of the Educators and Deep State- The Invisible Government Behind the Scenes. He is founder of Liberty Sentinel.--What brought the collapse about-- The approximate cause is that they were sitting on a very large number of U.S. bonds. So when interest rates rise, long-term U.S. treasury bonds decline in value. In other words, the bank was sitting on large, unrealized losses on the bonds. When depositors began trying to pull out their money, they had to sell some of the bonds and they ended up realizing some of those loses and at that point it became obvious there wasn't going to be enough money to cover the deposits.--Alex believes that at its core, our monetary system is fundamentally unsustainable and must lead to destruction. In fact, he contends that what we're seeing now is exactly what America saw in the run-up to the Great Depression. You'll see this all come together as he provides the history behind the Great Depression, the creation of the Federal Reserve, the role of the FDIC, and the FedNow Service.

Discusses the SVB meltdown and the economy writ largeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Paul Gill, Sr. was the Third Mate on the Liberty Ship SS Nathanael Greene which sailed to Archangel, Russia, with Convoy PQ18 in September 1942. Armageddon in the Arctic Ocean is Gill's memoir chronicling his life from the Great Depression through his service in the US Navy during WWII and his later graduation from Harvard Business School. Along the way, readers will learn of Gill's enrollment in the Civilian Conservation Corps at age fifteen; how he joined the Merchant Marine and made eight passages to European ports as a sixteen-year-old; his riding the rails across the United States in search of work in 1938; his return to the Merchant Marine and ascension "up the hawse pipe" to become a licensed Merchant Marine officer; his participation in the biggest convoy battle of World War II; the destruction of the Nathanael Greene off the coast of North Africa by U-565; and more.

It's the three-year anniversary of 15 days to slow the spread. Unfortunately, it's not a time for celebration either. That moment began a spiral of events that is sending America down the road of a second Great Depression. Jesse Kelly explains how Democrats AND Republicans both contributed to the coming economic demise. Diversity is at the center of it as well. Dave Rubin joins Jesse to break down Gavin Newsom's role in the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. Plus, appearances from Tudor Dixon and Asra Nomani.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SPRING BREEEEEAK!!!! Today we're taking a break from not talking about cults, so as to learn more about the Blackburn Cult, the proper name of which is the Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven, a name perhaps designed to remind people that while the Great Depression might be raging, you can still use as many words and letters as you want when naming your Jesus-adjacent child-resurrection grift. Then it's time for a ROAD TRIIIIIIP!!! To a blank spot by I-35, just north of Dallas, in June, for an outdoor Jesus music festival in weather more like Actual Hell than anyone seems willing to discuss! Explo '72 was the fundamentalist Woodstock that people had, I guess, been waiting for? Which people, and since when, are questions I definitely don't care about. Join us, won't you? SHOTS! SHOTS! SHOTS! SHOTS!

Throughout history, whenever there has been a major shift in the world, it has usually been accompanied by a single iconic event that is associated with that change. For example, historians often point to 476 AD as the year that the Western Roman Empire fell, when Odoacer and his barbarians forced the abdication of the Emperor Romulus Augustus— even though it was obvious that Rome was in decline way before 476. People also often associate the start of the Great Depression with the stock market crash of 1929 (even though there were many signs of economic distress well in advance of that). But these clean, precise dates are only chosen in retrospect. People experiencing the events at the time rarely understand their significance. I think it's possible that future historians may look back at Silicon Valley Bank's collapse as one of those iconic events that signals a major shift... potentially the end of American geopolitical and economic dominance. I'm not making this assertion to be dramatic; rather I think that anyone who takes an objective look at the facts— the appalling $31+ trillion national debt the government's addiction to spending and multi-trillion dollar deficits social dysfunction and “mostly peaceful” protests the decline in military strength rampant inflation and central bank folly extreme government incompetence insolvency in major programs like Social Security — will reach the same conclusion that the United States is past its peak and in decline. Now on top of everything else we can add a loss of confidence in the US banking system. Obviously I take no pleasure in acknowledging the US is in decline. But that doesn't make it any less true. And this has been Sovereign Man's core ethos since inception back in 2009. Back when I started this company it was considered extremely controversial when I said the US was in decline, or that there would be larger problems in the banking system, or that the breakdown of social cohesion would only get worse. But today these challenges are so obvious that they're impossible to deny. You can never solve a problem until you first admit you have one. And most of the corrupt sycophants masquerading as political leadership are incapable of admitting problems, nor discussing them rationally, let alone solving them. But you and I do not have that disability. We are free to exercise the full range of human ingenuity and creativity with which we have been fortunately endowed. So while the people in charge continue to never miss an opportunity to demonstrate their uselessness, we have a whole world of freedom and opportunity at our disposal. This is the topic of today's podcast. First I review the huge issues with the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Honestly when you look at it from a big picture perspective, it's littered with mind-numbing incompetence. The politicians who received donations from SVB's Political Action Committee missed it. The Wall Street hot shots missed it. The credit ratings agencies missed it. The regulators missed it. The Federal Reserve missed it. But now the Federal Reserve has launched a new program that exposes the US dollar— and everyone who uses it— to significant risk. Think about this from the perspective of foreign governments and central banks. Foreigners bought boatloads of US government debt over the past few years, especially in the early days of the pandemic. In fact foreign ownership of US government debt has increased by $1 trillion since the start of the pandemic, and now amounts to more than $7.6 trillion. But thanks to Fed policy, these foreign institutions are in the same boat as Silicon Valley Bank— they're sitting on huge losses in their bond portfolios. They've also suffered from pitiful returns, high inflation, AND exchange rate losses. In short, any foreign institution that bought US government bonds over the past few years is sitting on huge losses....

Timothy Sandefur is the vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute and the author of six books, including Frederick Douglass: Self Made Man and Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness. These three women all lived during the Great Depression, so he talks to us about the literary, historical, and political scenes of the time, painting a picture of their works and relationships in context. We discuss the parallels between their time and ours, and his optimism for the future. Never miss another AdamSmithWorks update.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Timothy Sandefur is the vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute and the author of six books, including Frederick Douglass: Self Made Man and Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness. These three women lived in the time of the Great Depression, so he talks to us about the literary, historical, and political scenes of the time, painting a picture of their works and relationships in context. We discuss the parallels between their time and ours, and his optimism for the future. Never miss another AdamSmithWorks update.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Episode 2593: We Are Sliding Into A Great Depression

To hear the rest of the conversation, please join us on Patreon at - https://www.patreon.com/thekatiehalpershow Direct link to the Patreon portion of this broadcast's discussion - https://www.patreon.com/posts/norman-barbara-d-80188734 Norman Finkelstein, Barbara Smith and Robin D.G. Kelley debate identity politics. First Barbara and Robin go over the College Board's revision of its curriculum for its Advanced Placement African American Studies course. These revisions happened just weeks after Florida's Republican Governor Ron DeSantis threatened to ban the class in Florida schools. Then Norman joins the discussion. Norman G. Finkelstein received his PhD from the Princeton University Politics Department in 1987. He is the author of many books that have been translated into 60 foreign editions, including THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering, and GAZA: An inquest into its martyrdom. In the year 2020, Norman Finkelstein was named the fifth most influential political scientist in the world. Link to purchase Norman's book: https://www.sublationmedia.com/books/i'll-burn-that-bridge-when-i-get-to-it Barbara Smith is an author, activist, and independent scholar who has played a groundbreaking role in opening up a national cultural and political dialogue about the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender. She was among the first to define an African American women's literary tradition and to build Black women's studies and Black feminism in the United States. She has been politically active in many movements for social justice since the 1960s. She has edited three major collections about Black women: Conditions: Five, The Black Women's Issue (with Lorraine Bethel, 1979); All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (with Gloria T. Hull and Patricia Bell Scott, 1982); and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, 1983 She was cofounder and publisher until 1995 of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U. S. publisher for women of color to reach a wide national audience. She is the 2022-23—Hess Scholar-in-Residence, Brooklyn College. Link to "There's a Lot More That Needs to Be Done" an interview with Barbara Smith: https://www.thedriftmag.com/theres-a-lot-more-that-needs-to-be-done/ Robin D. G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. His books include, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class; Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America; Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. His essays have appeared in several publications, including The Nation, Monthly Review, New York Times, American Historical Review, American Quarterly, Social Text, Metropolis, Black Music Research Journal, and The Boston Review, for which he also serves as Contributing Editor. ***Please support The Katie Halper Show *** For bonus content, exclusive interviews, to support independent media and to help make this program possible, please join us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/thekatiehalpershow Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/tWby973p Follow Katie on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kthalps

Welcome to the Adams Archive, where the unspoken truths of society are uncovered and explored with passion and precision. Host Austin Adams dives deep into controversial topics that will make you question the very fabric of our world. In this groundbreaking episode, Austin investigates the American banking system and its unnerving implications for the future of the nation. Delve into the intricacies of fractional banking and discover how this seemingly innocuous concept has evolved into a far more sinister reality. Austin takes listeners on an intellectual journey that starts with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and leads to an examination of the Federal Reserve. With the aid of Edward Griffin's "The Creature from Jekyll Island," the podcast unravels the complex history and mechanisms behind modern banking practices that affect every aspect of our lives. As Austin navigates this labyrinth of information, he pursues an interview with Griffin himself to provide even greater insight into the hidden world of banking. If you're ready for a mind-blowing exploration of the financial system and its consequences, join Austin Adams in the Adams Archive for this eye-opening episode. Subscribe, leave a five-star review, and share your thoughts on this crucial issue. Find additional resources, articles, and videos at austinadams.subs.com, and prepare to have your perspective transformed. The Adams Archive is more than just a podcast; it's an invitation to challenge the status quo and uncover the astonishing truth about the world around us. Join the substack, follow our social media and more at https://linktr.ee/theaustinjadams   Full Transcription:  Hello, you bu to full people. My name is Austin Adams, and welcome to the Adams Archive. Today's episode is going to absolutely blow your mind. I have been diving deep into this topic over the past several, several days, and I can tell you I have never been more concerned for the future of America as I am now. Now, this is not about trafficking. This is not about politicians. This is not about, this is about the American banking system. Okay? Now, that may not sound very enticing to you, but once we get into this topic to the depths that we are going to today, You're gonna realize what I'm talking about. Okay. Now, what prompted this for me was looking into the Silicon Valley Bank collapsing. Okay? Now, that prompted me to figure out what the hell fractional banking is Figuring out fractional banking led me to realize that that is no longer the concept that we operate off of. No matter how scary fractional banking itself is, what we have today is even worse. Now. That drove me down a rabbit hole to figure out how we got to a point where fractional banking was even possible, which led me to learn all about the Federal Reserve, to learn about the Federal Reserve. There was a book that was written, and we will go over some of the highlights called The Creature from Jekyll Island. . Okay, now, that book beautifully written, um, there's some really good, uh, really, really good, uh, lectures online by, uh, Edward Griffin, and I'm gonna see if I can get him on the podcast. I messaged him today to see if, uh, maybe he can come on here and explain these things a little bit better than I can. But he's very, very brilliant. You should go listen to these lectures. They'll be included in the ck All right. If you're not in the CK already, go to austin adams.subs.com. You can sign up, you'll get all the articles, all the videos, all of the ish that we are talking about here today. All right. So without further a. Well maybe wanna do subscribe? , leave a five star review. All right. Tell me what you like about the podcast. Tell me what you learned about, uh, fractional banking, which again, doesn't sound very enticing, but promise you after you figure out everything that I figured out, your mind's gonna be blown. All right, so without further ado, let's jump into. The Adams Archive, the very first subject to today's podcast is going to be on the collapse of S V B. Okay, now, SVB is the Silicon Valley Bank. Silicon Valley Bank, obviously located in Silicon Valley, basically sent shockwaves through the entire tech industry. And that was right about a week ago, right? A few, not even a few days ago. All right. Through Wall Street, through Washington, everybody was shocked by what happens. Regulators have since shut down the bank to prevent a crisis in the broader banking system. Just days after another bank, signature bank was abruptly closed as well. Silicon Valley Bank, which provided banking services to nearly half of the country's venture capital backed technology and life science companies made this very the same mistake as many other banks. It invested most of its deposits in long-term debt like treasury bonds, promising steady, modest returns. However, the strategy proved shortsighted when the Federal Reserve looking to combat rapid inflation, started raising interest rates, making these once safe investments, far less attractive. All right. Silicon Valley Bank was also el uh, uniquely vulnerable due to its business being concentrated in the tech industry, which was experiencing a rapid decline in startup funding. As a result, its clients started to withdraw their money, and once some people started drawing their money, other people started withdrawing their money causing what they call a bank run. All right, now a bank run, so you have some terminology behind this. A bank run is basically when everybody starts to go line up outside of the banks, asking banks to give them the very money that they worked so hard for, the very money that they sweat bled, worked their asses off weekends over time to feed their children. Okay? And we'll learn about that fractional banking, which some of this has already alluded to already, which is terrifying, like I said. Okay, so now the collapse of Silicon Bank is the largest, since the 2008 financial crisis, the very largest bank to do so since. , which again, is only gonna get worse as people realize that our banking system is built on a house of cards. Just a little whistle in the wind will cause our entire financial system to collapse. All right, we're gonna talk about today some things like what is money, right? Why is it even hold value? Which is probably the most fundamental question that has one of the most concerning answers. Um, as you've noticed recently, I've been using the AI chatbot chat. G p T pretty consistently came out with their fourth generation of it today. Um, it's pretty incredible technology, but it helped me along the way doing some of these calculations to actually figure out what it would cause for the American financial system to collapse. And that's some of the things that we're gonna discuss here today. I'll go through those calculations with you. All right. It highlights the dangers of fractional reserve banking. When banks invest most of their deposits, they create more money than they hold in reserves, leading to a precarious situation where a loss of faith in the bank can trigger a run on deposits. In such cases, the bank makes gains privately, but losses are socially distributed. That's what you have to realize about this. When a bank is doing well, they profit ungodly amounts of money. When things aren't going well for a bank, you know who foots the bill? You and me, the American public foots the bill when they get bailed out by our government. So things are going great. They profit, you'll make a dollar. Well, maybe you make, you know, 2 cents off of every a hundred dollars that you have in your bank account based on interest. But when things are going great for the banks, they're not coming to you to pay you out dividends, right? But when things are going horribly bad,  and the government decides to bail them out. You know who pays that bill? And we don't even really pay it. And that's what I've realized from learning all of this. We don't even really pay it. We pay it through inflation. We pay it through the fictitious magical creation of money, which has no value unless we decide that it does again, which we'll talk about in a minute. So fractional Reserve banking to me is theft. It is a entity taking your money and putting it in as many places as possible so that they can continue to make money. They can give out loans with it. They can do all of these things, but the second you come ask for your money, while you and maybe your neighbor and a few other people at the same time, they don't have it. Cuz it's often these fictitious little places that they're hoping to make interest based on the fact that you're never gonna come ask them for it. At the same time. Right before the Great Depression, the US dollar was backed by gold. That ensured that the money in the economy was backed by something physical, something tangible, right? When something is backed by something, a commodity like gold or silver, right? Or even Bitcoin, right? If you understand how this works, right, the, the way that gold is created, gold is a, gold is a specific element that is created. And forgive me, I'm not a damn science teacher over here. Got a beer in my Yeti. So the way that gold is created is the earth puts together certain amounts of carbon. And when you get the perfect alignment of these, these elements, right? It creates what we know today is gold, right? Not fool's gold. Not all these other renditions of this potential possibility, but actual physical gold as we know it today, is a specific type of gold. Okay. Now that gold is minted, right? The, the earth had to have all of these situations happen simultaneously and in the proper way perfectly to cause gold to be created and to be in your hand the way that it can be today. Okay? That's what happens, right? The, the, the earth has a mathematical equation of circumstances and pressure and whatever the hell else it is, and then gold is physically created and minted by the earth. Okay? Something like, think of it, if you know anything about cryptocurrency, think of it like Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin ha has a computer that is working nonstop to create a bunch of algorithms and calculations to try to decrypt a or or mine a Bitcoin, the same way you mine gold. And eventually, after so many algorithms, so many computers are working to do this, one unlocks a Bitcoin and that creates scarcity. There's only a certain amount of bitcoins that are being created on a general basis. There's only a certain amount of gold that is being. By the earth at any given time, that scarcity gives it value, right? So during the Great Depression, our money was backed by gold. After the depression, the US abandoned the gold standard and became a fiat system. Okay? Fiat currency is not backed by anything at all. No assets, no commodities, right? And the fact that Silicon Valley Bank had basically uninsured depositors highlights the need for money to be backed by something physical like gold. And that ensures that depositors money is protected. It is being held physically somewhere to show that that piece of paper that you have is attached to a certain amount of, of physical minted developed by the earth gold or even Bitcoin, right? It has some sort of, of, of, uh, built-in scarcity.  that drives value, right? There's not, there's not an unlimited amount that can be created at the whim of any American who wants to profit based off the central banking system, which again, we'll learn more about in a minute. We're gonna learn a lot today. Um, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank underscores the need for tighter banking regulations, right? We've seen several, several things that have happened, right? Like, um, some regulations that were rolled back in 2018 under Donald Trump, right? Some banking experts believed that Dodd-Frank Financial regulatory package intended to prevent such collapses and could have stopped this bank from handling its interest rate risks, um, had it not been rolled back, which is some opinions, but the bigger problem, the biggest issue. When we talk about fractional banking, which again, I'll pull up here. Let, I'll, I'll talk you through it. Lemme just go through this article with you. The collapse of these banks that says has prompted a swift reevaluation of the Fed's interest rate increases. On Monday. Smaller banks rushed to en reassure customers that they were on firmer financial footing, but shares of US regional banks plummeted. The b W Bank Index, which tracks the performance of 24 major banks, fell 10%, erasing nearly 200 billion of value of the banks. In the index, it says, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in Signature Bank highlights the dangers of fractional reserve banking and the need for money to be backed by something physical. The follow of these collapses underscores the need for tighter banking regulations to prevent such collapses and ensure the stability of the financial system. Okay, let's talk about it. What is fractional banking? Okay. Fractional banking was the cause of what happened with svb. Right. What is fractional banking? Fractional banking is the idea that if you deposit a hundred dollars into a bank, the bank can take $90 of that 100. Hold onto the remaining 10, which was the standard prior to 2020. The standard prior to 2020 was that the banking system had to hold 10% of the overall val value in reserves. Now, that changed, but even with 10%, think of it this way, if you handed the, gave the bank 10 a hundred dollars, right? Let's say 10 people gave the bank a hundred dollars, right? They gave out 900 of that thousand dollars. Of the 10 people's a hundred dollars, which leaves them with one $100 bill. The other 900 they gave away to other people in the hopes of making interest in the future. So when two people, just two people go to the bank at the same time and say, I want my a hundred dollars. give me all of my $100 that I gave you. That is $200 that they're asking for. One of those people is not getting any of their money, or at least both of them are getting half of it. They don't have it. They don't even have it for two people, let alone the full 10 people that gave 'em a hundred dollars. Right? If just two people went and asked the bank for this money back, they would not be able to do it, right? 20% in this case. Now what we realize, it is far, far worse than that. In the real world scenario. What we realize, excuse me. What we realized is that in 2020 it was changed from 10%. Just 10% of the money in your banks had to be held onto by the, by the reserves, by the bank, just 10%. In 2020. During Covid, they changed that percentage. To 0%. None of it did they have to hold onto none of it in reserves. 0%. Not 1%, not 2%. 0% of your money has to be held by the bank in reserves. 0%. That is astonishing. There is no federal regulations at all now that say that the bank has to hold any of your money for withdraws. Right. What they are dependent on is if everything collapses, then the F D I C, the Federal Something Insurance Commission, will basically has insured each each value of each customer up to $250,000, which again, we'll find out, is a complete farce. What a terrible word. Farce is a terrible word. It's like, I don't even like to say it. It's like saying fart farce. I don't know. Anyways, FARs is a complete, FARs is bullshit. There's nothing there for you to take in. So, so when two of those people in that scenario that I gave you, go to the bank and ask for their money back, and somebody's going to walk away with no money, so, so one person gets their a hundred dollars out, the second person goes and asks for 10 of it, just 10 of it. Now that person realizes that the bank does not have their money. They start talking to their friends, you know who their friends are. The other eight people in this scenario who gave the bank a hundred dollars. Now you have all other eight people, nine people in total going to the bank saying, I want my money back. But the bank has none of it. They don't have to hold onto any of it. And the scenario is actually far worse than that in today's world. After 2020 and that legislation changed. The scenario is now anybody goes to the bank and starts to ask them for that money back. They don't have to hold onto any of it. That my friends is fractional banking. And it scares the shit outta me, and it's not even fractional anymore. There's no fraction. The fraction's gone. It's fictitious banking. That's what it is. It's no longer even fractional, which was horrible. It's far, far worse. Okay. Do you wanna know how fragile our entire banking system is here in the United States? Here is the most terrifying thing that you will hear today. Okay. Chat, G P t concluded that if 2% of Americans, 2% of Americans decided to withdraw their money from the bank, at the same time, it could have a high potential of causing a collapse of the entire banking system that as we know it today, the entire banking system as we know it today, just 2%, two out of a hundred people, two out of a hundred people went to their bank right now. This concluded and calculated. The entire banking system could collapse. So again, it's far worse than that scenario that I gave you and let me walk you through how it got to that. Okay. Chat. G p T said we can try to make a rough estimation based on some data points. Okay. Now I had to do some finagling to give, actually give me this cuz I didn't wanna gimme this answer. It says, first it's essential to understand that the reserve requirement being 0% means that banks are not required to hold a specific percentage of their deposits as reserved. However, it doesn't mean the banks hold no reserves at all, right? They still maintain some reserves. Doesn't give you an amount cause it can't, to manage day-to-day transactions and withdrawals day to day, not week to week, not month to month, day-to-day. The amount of their reserves varies by bank. It depends on the bank size, number of clients, and other factors. To estimate the percentage of people required to cause a nationwide banking collapse, we need to consider the amount of money held in deposits and the amount of reserves held by banks. According to the Federal Reserve, as of September, 2021, the total amount of money in the deposits in the US banks was around 17 trillion. Okay. Assuming that these banks still maintain some reserves, assuming that they maintain some reserves, it says, let's calculate, based on 2% of their deposits are held as reserves. This would amount to approximately 342 billion in reserves. If depositors were to withdraw their money in such a way that bank reserves were insufficient to cover the withdrawals, it could potentially trigger a banking collapse, right? That's the other eight people, nine people going to the bank and saying, I want my money, because the other, the second person went there to ask for it, and it wasn't there to find the percentage of people who would neither withdraw their funds to cause a banking collapse. We can use the following formula. Reserves divided by deposits times 100 equals the percentage of people. Okay, so we take that 342 billion, right of the 2% seven. Divide that by the 17.1 trillion. Multiply that by 100, it gives you 2%. It says, based on this rough estimation, if around 2% of people in the United States simultaneously withdrew their their money from the banks, it could potentially cause a nationwide banking collapse. Says, however, this is a highly simplified calculation. Does not take into account many factors such as the variation in reserve levels among the banks, the distribution of deposits, and the possibility of banks borrowing money from other sources to cover withdrawals. Additionally, the Federal Reserve Act as a lender of last resort and can provide emergency funds to banks facing a liquidity prices which could prevent a collapse. Okay? Now what it goes on to say is that in summary, it's difficult to provide a precise percentage of people required to cause a nationwide banking collapse due to 0% fractional reserve requirements. However, based on this rough estimation of 2% of people with through their funds, it could cause a banking crisis. Um, it says that reme to remember that the Federal Reserve could intervene to prevent a collapse. Oh, don't, don't worry about anything. The Federal Reserve is here to save you. It's not gonna collapse when the Federal Reserve is here. What is the government's got our back. Hmm. Is the Federal Reserve a part of the government? No, it is not. It's a mixture being overseen in some way, shape, or form by Congress. But we even find out that that's not true. But it was, and you can read all about this in the Creature from JE Island, but we're gonna get into it now. Okay. The Federal Reserve has absolutely nothing, was not founded by the government. You want to know who the, the Federal Reserve was founded by? The Federal Reserve was founded by bankers, the very bankers that you know the name of, and you can probably take a guess as to who people from the Rockefeller family. Aldrich family, JP Morgan Chase. Seven men secretly met on an island in Georgia, concealing their identities, changing their names. They met on a private train cart to discuss how they were going to essentially take over the world's banking systems, starting with the United States. These seven men's wealth, seven men's wealth equated to one fourth of the Total World's wealth at the time, and all they wanted to do was figure out how they could take over the other three fourths. It's pretty simple. When you get seven guys in the room, why wouldn't you do that? Right? So let's unmask the architects of the Federal Reserve. And talk about why every single American should be outraged at this historical account. And here it is. As you go about your daily life, there's a creature lurking behind the scenes polling the strings of our economy. This seemingly innocuous entity is none other than the Federal Reserve and its origin story is as chilling as any horror tale when you realize the truth In the eye-opening book, the Creature from Jekyll Island by Edward Griffin, it unveils the clandestine beginnings of the Fed in the dangers it poses to our society. The secret birth of the Federal Reserve in 1910, a group of influential bankers in 1910 and politicians gathered in secrecy on JE Island in Georgia to hatch a plan that would forever change the course of American history. Their mission. To create a centralized banking system that would benefit their own, their own interests, while consolidating power and control over the nation's finances. This figurative meeting laid the groundwork for the creation of the Federal Reserve. In 1913, our entire structural financial system was built less than 111 years ago. An institution that now, now holds immense power and sway over our economy basically dictates all of it. The key architects or the Federal Reserve were no ordinary individuals. They were powerful cabal of bankers and politicians, including Paul Warberg, Nelson Aldrich, JP Morgan, among others. Their goal was to establish a banking cartel that would protect their interests while simultaneously controlling the country's monetary policy. By doing so, they could manipulate the economy to their advantage. Profiting from booms and bus while leaving ordinary Americans to bear the consequences. The Federal Reserve's very existence poses a threat to our society. Its power to  create money out of thin air and manipulate interest rates, allows it to control the value of our currency, often leading to inflation and devaluation. Moreover, the Fed's unelected the Fed's unelected officials operate with minimal transparency, making decisions that affect millions and millions of people without any public oversight whatsoever. Furthermore, the Federal Reserve's ability to bail out large financial institutions in times of crisis promotes moral hazard. Big banks take on excessive risks knowing that the Federal Reserve will rescue them if things go south, which is exactly what we saw happened with S V B. This reckless. This reckless behavior can lead to financial crisises with ordinary citizens left to foot the bill, which is exactly what I talked about earlier, right? When they can create money out of thin air, it's not out of thin air, it's out of future comfortability for the American people. It causes inflation, and that's where we're gonna see the result when they created trillions of dollars during covid so that they could pay people not to work, so they could shut down the economy for their own agenda to cause you to get vaccinated so Pfizer could profit off of it. Now, the Federal Reserve born from a secretive gathering of powerful elites wields enormous power over our economy. Its actions can lead to inflation, devaluation, financial crisises, all while operating with minimal transparency. It says, as Americans, we must be aware of the Fed's origins and inherent risk opposes to our society. We should demand greater transparency, oversight, de, and democratic control over this powerful institution. It's time for us to stand up and fight against the creature that has taken a hold of our economy before it's too late. And I personally believe that it might already be too late. Okay. It is so crazy to see how this came together and what, what this entire financial system is built on. Like I said, it's a house of cards. Okay. Let's go ahead and let's watch a little bit of this clip. And this is by the author  

The roots of the Second World War in Europe lie within the First World War. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles formally ended the war between Germany and the western Allies, but the geopolitical situation it created was far from stable. Ten years later, the Great Depression made things even worse. In this episode, Sean and James discuss the unsettled state of Europe between 1918 and 1930 and the gradual fracturing of the uneasy peace that it enjoyed.

Barter Theatre, which opened during the Great Depression and is thriving 90 years later, is known for bringing regional themes to its rural Appalachian stage. Jeffrey Brown visited Abingdon, Virginia, to show the changing face of the area for our arts and culture series, CANVAS. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed religion scholar, Stephen Prothero, captures the compelling and unique saga of twentieth-century America on an identity quest through the eyes and books of one of the most influential editors of the day—a search, born of two world wars, for resolution of our divided identity as a Christian nation and a nation of religions. One summer evening in 1916 in Blanchester, Ohio, a sixteen-year-old farm boy was riding his horse past the town cemetery. The horse reared back and whinnied, and Eugene Exman saw God. For the rest of his life, he struggled to recreate that moment. Through a treasure of personal letters and papers, God, the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time (HarperOne, 2023) explores Exman's personal quest. A journey that would lead him in the late 1920s to the Harper religious books department, which he turned during the Great Depression into a money-making juggernaut and the country's top religion publisher. Exman's role in the shaping of American religion is undeniable. Here was a man who was ahead of his time and leading the rest of the nation through books on a spiritual exploration. Exman published bestsellers by the controversial preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Catholic radical Dorothy Day, the Civil Rights pioneer Howard Thurman, and two Nobel laureates: Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther King Jr. Exman did not just sit at a desk and read. In addition to his lifelong relationships with the most influential leaders of the day, Exman was on a spiritual journey of his own traversing the world in search of God. He founded a club of mystics, dropped acid in 1958, four years before Timothy Leary. And six years before The Beatles went to India, he found a guru there in 1962. In the end, this is the story of the popularization of the religion of experience—a cultural story of modern America on a quest of its own. Exman helped to reimagine and remake American religion, turning the United States into a place where denominational boundaries are blurred, diversity is valued, and the only creed is that individual spiritual experience is the essence of religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

*Machines whirring* Chaplin goes ham in the Little Tramp's last hurrah. Punch that time card for banana-loving beauties, gibberish ditties, and confounding contraband. The person most confused by the film this week was: the poor old Gentleman Who Ordered the Roast Duck.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed religion scholar, Stephen Prothero, captures the compelling and unique saga of twentieth-century America on an identity quest through the eyes and books of one of the most influential editors of the day—a search, born of two world wars, for resolution of our divided identity as a Christian nation and a nation of religions. One summer evening in 1916 in Blanchester, Ohio, a sixteen-year-old farm boy was riding his horse past the town cemetery. The horse reared back and whinnied, and Eugene Exman saw God. For the rest of his life, he struggled to recreate that moment. Through a treasure of personal letters and papers, God, the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time (HarperOne, 2023) explores Exman's personal quest. A journey that would lead him in the late 1920s to the Harper religious books department, which he turned during the Great Depression into a money-making juggernaut and the country's top religion publisher. Exman's role in the shaping of American religion is undeniable. Here was a man who was ahead of his time and leading the rest of the nation through books on a spiritual exploration. Exman published bestsellers by the controversial preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Catholic radical Dorothy Day, the Civil Rights pioneer Howard Thurman, and two Nobel laureates: Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther King Jr. Exman did not just sit at a desk and read. In addition to his lifelong relationships with the most influential leaders of the day, Exman was on a spiritual journey of his own traversing the world in search of God. He founded a club of mystics, dropped acid in 1958, four years before Timothy Leary. And six years before The Beatles went to India, he found a guru there in 1962. In the end, this is the story of the popularization of the religion of experience—a cultural story of modern America on a quest of its own. Exman helped to reimagine and remake American religion, turning the United States into a place where denominational boundaries are blurred, diversity is valued, and the only creed is that individual spiritual experience is the essence of religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Episode 66 is up! Our guest is Paulette Kennedy.Originally from the Ozarks, Paulette Kennedy now lives in a quiet suburb of Los Angeles with her family and a menagerie of rescue pets. When she isn't writing, she enjoys tending to her garden, knitting, and finding unique vintage treasures at thrift stores and flea markets. As a history lover, she can get lost for days in her research—learning everything she can about the places in her stories and what her characters might have experienced in the past. Paulette's current release is THE WITCH OF TIN MOUNTAIN, a witchy southern gothic set in rural Northern Arkansas during the Great Depression. In this episode we discussed the myriad of inspirations for her most recent release, THE WITCH OF TIN MOUNTAIN, to include her father, who lived through the Great Depression; how she managed writing three different timelines and the crossover of some those characters. We discussed her research to include her own genealogy and oral storytelling in the Ozarks and Appalachia, and the pervasive issues she covered which occurred over a hundred years.I want to thank all of who have subscribed to this podcast! If you haven't, I'd love it if you'd click to follow so you can get notifications of every new episode. And, if have found this podcast helpful and fun, please leave a rating and review—it really helps to boost discoverability. You can even share this episode with a friend. For more information about me, Tif, and submitting to the podcast, please head on to my website, at TifMarcelo.comLinks discussedMarvelous by Marley GreeleySing Our Bones Eternal by Kacey RayburnPaper Doll Lina Robyn Lucas***Preorder Tif's next book WHEN JASMINE BLOOMS, a contemporary fiction inspired by Marmee of Little Women, about a woman who suffers a great tragedy, wonders 'what if' and it comes true.Note: some links are affiliate linksContact Tif at tif@tifmarcelo.comPlease check out her website for podcast submissions

In the past few days, 3 U.S. banks collapsed, including Silicon Valley Bank and two banks deeply embedded in the cryptocurrency industry, causing the largest bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis, the second-biggest bank crash in U.S. history, and widespread fear about the state of the economy. Sadly, choosing fear during these kinds of uncertain times keeps the majority of people in a place of contraction when wealthy people know economic downturns are the best times to pursue opportunities and build wealth. For example, the number of millionaires who made their wealth was the highest ever in American history during the Great Depression. In this episode, learn 3 ways you can fight those money fears coming up during economic uncertainty and how to not get paralyzed so you can take advantage of opportunities to build a financial plan and stability, not matter how unstable the economy is. Book a complimentary 30 min financial strategy consult with us at https://calendly.com/internationalempowerment/consult If you're from an immigrant family - apply to join Immigrant Finance School™, our signature wealth building program for immigrant families, where we empower people to make that shift from surviving to thriving to build generational wealth: immigrantfinanceschool.com For everybody - we're offering limited private financial coaching - reach out and book a consult to learn more! https://calendly.com/internationalempowerment/consult Listen to episode 133 Expansion During a Recession https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/133-expansion-during-a-recession/id1545594859?i=1000574703043

New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed religion scholar, Stephen Prothero, captures the compelling and unique saga of twentieth-century America on an identity quest through the eyes and books of one of the most influential editors of the day—a search, born of two world wars, for resolution of our divided identity as a Christian nation and a nation of religions. One summer evening in 1916 in Blanchester, Ohio, a sixteen-year-old farm boy was riding his horse past the town cemetery. The horse reared back and whinnied, and Eugene Exman saw God. For the rest of his life, he struggled to recreate that moment. Through a treasure of personal letters and papers, God, the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time (HarperOne, 2023) explores Exman's personal quest. A journey that would lead him in the late 1920s to the Harper religious books department, which he turned during the Great Depression into a money-making juggernaut and the country's top religion publisher. Exman's role in the shaping of American religion is undeniable. Here was a man who was ahead of his time and leading the rest of the nation through books on a spiritual exploration. Exman published bestsellers by the controversial preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Catholic radical Dorothy Day, the Civil Rights pioneer Howard Thurman, and two Nobel laureates: Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther King Jr. Exman did not just sit at a desk and read. In addition to his lifelong relationships with the most influential leaders of the day, Exman was on a spiritual journey of his own traversing the world in search of God. He founded a club of mystics, dropped acid in 1958, four years before Timothy Leary. And six years before The Beatles went to India, he found a guru there in 1962. In the end, this is the story of the popularization of the religion of experience—a cultural story of modern America on a quest of its own. Exman helped to reimagine and remake American religion, turning the United States into a place where denominational boundaries are blurred, diversity is valued, and the only creed is that individual spiritual experience is the essence of religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed religion scholar, Stephen Prothero, captures the compelling and unique saga of twentieth-century America on an identity quest through the eyes and books of one of the most influential editors of the day—a search, born of two world wars, for resolution of our divided identity as a Christian nation and a nation of religions. One summer evening in 1916 in Blanchester, Ohio, a sixteen-year-old farm boy was riding his horse past the town cemetery. The horse reared back and whinnied, and Eugene Exman saw God. For the rest of his life, he struggled to recreate that moment. Through a treasure of personal letters and papers, God, the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time (HarperOne, 2023) explores Exman's personal quest. A journey that would lead him in the late 1920s to the Harper religious books department, which he turned during the Great Depression into a money-making juggernaut and the country's top religion publisher. Exman's role in the shaping of American religion is undeniable. Here was a man who was ahead of his time and leading the rest of the nation through books on a spiritual exploration. Exman published bestsellers by the controversial preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Catholic radical Dorothy Day, the Civil Rights pioneer Howard Thurman, and two Nobel laureates: Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther King Jr. Exman did not just sit at a desk and read. In addition to his lifelong relationships with the most influential leaders of the day, Exman was on a spiritual journey of his own traversing the world in search of God. He founded a club of mystics, dropped acid in 1958, four years before Timothy Leary. And six years before The Beatles went to India, he found a guru there in 1962. In the end, this is the story of the popularization of the religion of experience—a cultural story of modern America on a quest of its own. Exman helped to reimagine and remake American religion, turning the United States into a place where denominational boundaries are blurred, diversity is valued, and the only creed is that individual spiritual experience is the essence of religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

This is episode 1,117 of the Arete Coach Podcast with host Severin Sorensen, with a special episode that Explores Financial Contagion Risk and the Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. As of 6:30 PM EDT, 12 March 2023, the Federal Goverment had intervened to guarantee depositor funds, allowing bank customers to access funds in time to make payroll on 3/15; the 'ides of march.' If those words cast a dark omen of the future, they ought to. In this episode, we explore what economic and financial contagion risks are and what are the causes, roots, and factors that seem to set wildfire to human behavior. We explore the happenings this past week with the death spiral and failure of Silicon Valley Bank, one of the oldest and largest banks serving the private equity and venture capital community. We revisit a play-by-play of the collapse of SVB from the point of view of the CEO and a customer depositor at the bank, and their different experiences. Importantly, we revisit prior financial crises to explore similarities and differences, and, review what the research suggests business leaders can do to prepare and protect themselves from foreseeable events. A list of 10 action items is provided for executive coaches, business owners, CEOs, and C-level executives to navigate at this time. Severin Sorensen is an economist, executive coach, and serial entrepreneur with a keen curiosity for business and economic trends. Severin is CEO of ePraxis LLC, a premier-level executive headhunting, talent selection, and executive coaching company. Severin is a highly sought Vistage Speaker with over 300+ presentations worldwide on hiring top talent, innovation, and economic trends. Severin was a Vistage Chair (2010-2018) of three Vistage Groups in Salt Lake City, UT, and during this period he was a repeat Mentor Chair and awarded the 2011 Vistage Rookie Chair of the Year Award. Prior to Chairing, Severin was a Vistage/TEC member in Washington DC (1999-2004) while he owned and operated a company he founded called Sparta Consulting Corporation (1994-2005), a management consulting, security systems integration, and remote video monitoring company; Severin sold this company in 2005 and it continues today as part of Interface Security Systems, the 7th largest security systems integrator in the US (2018). Severin was a former “Special Assistant to the President” at the White House where he had the high honor to work for President George H.W. Bush (POTUS 41) (1992-93). Severin earned a graduate degree (M.Phil.) in economics from King's College, Cambridge, University, England, and two undergraduate degrees in economics and political science from the University of Utah. While an undergraduate, Severin was the Editor in Chief of the Utah Forum: A journal on international political economy. Severin is the author of Economic Misery and Crime Waves (2009), a book that chronicles the Great Depression (1929-42) and the situation leading up to the Great Recession (2007-2009). Today, Severin prepares a quarterly economic overview for business coaches and business owner/operators on the economy, identifying key behavioral economic trends that impact businesses and their opportunity frontiers. More on the topic of the economy and executive coaching insights are available at AreteCoach.io. The Arete Coach Podcast seeks to explore the art and science of executive coaching. You can find out more about this podcast at aretecoach.io. This episode was produced on March 12, 2023 Copyright © 2023 by Arete Coach™ LLC. All rights reserved.

John 4:25-26 KJV The woman saith unto him, I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all things. (26) Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/andrewhorval/support

Instead of starting with a snack, Mark and Jana get right back into the discussion from last weeks episode: self reliance during weather events (and any major event). To weigh in on this subject, your clever hosts have an even cleverer in studio guest! Miss Georgia (aka: Mom) Talks about her young years living thorough the great depression. To wrap up, Jana serves a citrus upside-down cake and spearmint tea.

Today's guest is Ylan Kazi, Chief Data Officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota. Ever since Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota began following the Great Depression, they have been dedicated to helping people get affordable health care solutions to improve their health and well-being. As we enter a new era of healthcare, BCBSND continues to transform the way healthcare is delivered and to make a meaningful difference for those they serve. Ylan brings deep strategic experience in analytics, emerging technology, data governance and other aspects of creating a data-driven culture. He leads the Enterprise Data and Analytics Solutions team, where he is focused on creating and executing data strategy using sophisticated analytic capabilities and modern data governance practices. He works closely with C-level and other senior executives by finding value in data and using it to drive clinical and financial results for members. In the episode, Ylan will talk about: The work they do at Blue Cross Blue Shield, His role and responsibilities as Chief Data Officer, How the culture & people attracted him to the company, How they are using data to impact the overall business, Plans for growing the team, and Why BCBS of North Dakota is a great place to work

Tonight ‘In Focus,' New York Times columnist David French pens an OP-ED decrying the right's attempt to save children from transgender surgeries… it's apparently an assault on the Constitution. Also, Jane Fonda responds to people who did not like her comment on ‘The View about murdering pro-lifers, we'll see if her response is satisfactory.Plus, a report exposes Thomas Jefferson High School's ties to China.And, two banks collapse into financial ruin.. sparking concerns of another Great Depression.

Today's guest, John Hurd, is a runner and competes in sprinting competitions around the country. He has won 168 gold medals including 9 national championship golds in his lifetime. What makes that an even more impressive number is that John is 91 years old and started running at the age of 61. Born at the height of the Great Depression and too small to participate in sports as a school kid, he learned at age 60 about the national senior games, and began to train himself as a sprinter. Prepare to be inspired by John's drive, passion, persistence and humble spirit. And maybe you'll think about dusting off your running shoes. Your Daily Chocolate is in the top 25% of most shared, and most followed podcasts worldwide, so let's boost it up even higher. Take 10 seconds today and share the show with some friends that you know will love it, and make 2023 an even brighter year for those you care about. Please consider supporting this podcast with a modest contribution here - just hit the "support" button to continue to hear good news from big name inspiring guests - Ad free! Be sure to subscribe to the newsletter at yourdailychocolate.com for extra content and all sorts of good stuff. If you like the show, please rate and review, or share it with anyone you think would like a little good news in their life. You can also subscribe to Your Daily Chocolate on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or your preferred platform. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/patty-deutsche/support